


You Complete Me

by teenage_hustler



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Auror Harry Potter, F/M, Quidditch, Roses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 04:45:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14993087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teenage_hustler/pseuds/teenage_hustler
Summary: When Pansy asks Harry to help her organise a Hogwarts Quidditch tournament, past secrets and present secrets reveal themselves as Harry and Pansy reveal themselves to each other.Originally written for meiri_fics for 2010's HP Porninthesun exchange. It's one of the longest fics I've written, which is an achievement in itself, I suppose. I particularly like the rose motif.





	You Complete Me

Pansy stood at the mirror, nervously running fingernail after shaped, painted red fingernail through her straight, ebony bob. It was a gesture as ridiculous as it was repetitive, since between expensive monthly haircuts and daily hair potion and charm rituals, a hair was very seldom out of place on Pansy Parkinson’s head. Pansy herself knew how silly she was being, and she could only put it down to nerves. _After all_ , she rationalised, _it’s not every day that you’re asked to meet up with your old Transfiguration teacher, now Headmistress of a school whose halls you haven’t graced for ten years_.

With one last drag of fingernail through hair, she tugged at her blouse in a pointless attempt to further straighten it out and rapped on the heavy brass knocker.

“Password?” came a curt, business-like voice, presumably from behind the door.

“Ginger snap,” Pansy answered, and the door gave way to the spiral staircase Pansy had only read about in the letters from the Headmistress organising this meeting. She stepped onto the staircase and let it take her to the enormous office. Had Pansy been more relaxed, she would have taken a moment to consider the glass cabinets full of precious magical objects, the shelves of pictures depicting past headmasters, and the grandiose solid oak desk, immaculately tidy in a way she could only dream of her own desk being and polished to an almost eerie shine. In her current state, however, all Pansy could really notice was the woman sitting at the desk, regarding her with the same formidability that had secretly both terrified and impressed her for seven consecutive years.

“Professor McGonagall?” she tentatively greeted this woman.

“Really, Miss Parkinson. I haven’t been your Professor for nearly a decade. I think you can call me ‘Minerva’ without breaking any boundaries. Now, take a seat, and stop fussing about your hair. You surely did enough of that outside my door.”

Pansy snatched her hand away from her scalp and moved hurriedly to the magnificent desk, where she quickly parked her behind on one of several severely uncomfortable wooden chairs. She felt herself, surprisingly, start to relax. There was something strangely comforting about the fact that, apart from a few more streaks of grey in her hair, and one or two extra wrinkles along the corners of her eyes, Minerva McGonagall had not changed at all in the past ten years. And considering how much Pansy’s life had changed in that time, it was nice to see that some things, or some people, remain constant.

“How have you been, Miss Parkinson?” Minerva addressed her now.

“Really, Minerva. I haven’t been your student for nearly a decade. You can probably call me ‘Pansy’ without breaking any boundaries,” Pansy answered, without thinking.

Fortunately Minerva took Pansy’s answer in her stride. “Very well. How have you been, Pansy?”

Despite that ever-present formidability, it was obvious that Minerva was completely at ease over this meeting. Seeing this enabled Pansy to relax further. This time, indeed, she was able to think about her answer. “Not too bad. Things are pretty slow in our office. Generally we’re only really busy during the national Quidditch season.”

“Indeed,” Minerva nodded. “I read your Quidditch reports in the _Daily Prophet_ often.”

“It’s not too difficult to write about what you know.” Pansy’s choice in career had generated surprise in a lot of people. Even her father had spared a moment to ask what had possessed her to try to become a sports writer. Like with everybody else who had enquired, Pansy had answered “Not a sports writer, Father. A Quidditch writer. It’s a much more specialist field. And I want to be one because I like Quidditch.” And that was true enough. She couldn’t play the sport to save her life, but Pansy had always been an avid follower. Being a devoted supporter of the Holyhead Harpies had caused many heated discussions in the Slytherin common room during her time at Hogwarts. Now that she wrote about the Harpies, and other teams, professionally, she was given free tickets all the time. Pansy couldn’t have asked for a better job, as far as she was concerned.

“Yes. I can tell from your writing that Quidditch is, as you say, what you know,” Minerva said. “That is why I have asked you to come today.”

“Really?” Pansy asked. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Minerva had been incredibly vague in her owls, saying nothing but that she wanted to discuss something with Pansy, and could she please come to the school at a time that suited her. The purpose of the meeting could have been anything. To be perfectly honest, Pansy had been half-worried that Minerva had finally found out about all of those extremely forbidden late-night make-out sessions with Draco during sixth and seventh year and was planning to punish her for them ten years on. She’d considered a couple of other, less frightening possible topics, but Quidditch hadn’t entered into it. It probably should have, since Pansy was pretty useless with most other subject matters.

“Really,” Minerva confirmed. “As you know, it will have been exactly ten years since You-Know-Who’s downfall here at Hogwarts in a few months’ time. The other members of staff, the Board of Directors and I have been discussing this milestone, and we’ve decided that it would be fitting to hold some sort of event to honour it, and to raise needed funds for materials and specialist assistants to complete the Hogwarts restoration. It’s still going, believe it or not.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Pansy said, nodding in consideration. “But what does this have to do with Quidditch?”

“Well,” answered Minerva, “seeing how popular Quidditch is and always has been at Hogwarts, we decided that what we would most like to do is to host a day-long Quidditch tournament, much like the yearly tournaments we have here.”

Pansy nodded approvingly. “I like that idea. So this would be similar to a House Quidditch Cup, with the four Hogwarts houses going against each other, but the whole tournament would only last a day?”

“Correct.”

“Hmmm.” Pansy was thinking fast. Possible problems and derivations were rapid-firing in her head. “Who is going to play in each team? Will it be the current house teams?”

“Definitely not. As much as I am sure they would relish the idea, they will have far too much on their plates to do any necessary training. Aside from that, we thought that a good way of honouring this occasion would be to bring in the best players from former Hogwarts teams.”

“No way!” Pansy exclaimed, making Minerva jump in her chair. “That’s a brilliant idea! We could bring in all of the former greats! Marcus Flint, Adrian Pucey, Draco, of course—“

“As long as you kindly remember that there were some excellent Quidditch players in the houses that aren’t Slytherin as well,” Minerva interrupted, carefully readjusting her glasses. “We’re not intending to make this event more than a day of celebratory, fund-raising enjoyment. We are hoping to avoid all former overly intense house rivalries.”

“With all due respect, Minerva, house rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor will probably never die,” Pansy said. “But what does this have to do with me?”

“Well, it’s simple,” Minerva said calmly. “We would like you to organise it.”

You could have knocked Pansy over with a feather. That, or an incredibly weakly-flicked _Wingardium Leviosa_. If it weren’t for Pansy’s Quidditch knowledge, Minerva’s request would have been completely out-of-the-blue. Pansy was no organiser – she could barely organise herself in the morning without a decent cup of coffee at hand. She wasn’t remotely involved with Hogwarts these days, or any post-war fundraising efforts. The idea of a former Slytherin assisting in post-war cleaning up was almost laughable, whether you overtly sided with Voldemort or not. And she hadn’t kept in contact with anybody, save her still good friend Draco Malfoy, from her Hogwarts days, and those who knew her back then hadn’t liked her very much unless they too were Slytherin. She wrote about Quidditch. That was all. Surely Minerva could have come up with a million other more appropriate and significant people to organise this event for them than her? She was nobody.

“Why me?” she eventually asked

Minerva raised her eyebrows. “Why not? You’re a journalist, so publicity isn’t an issue. And you know Quidditch so well that you would know exactly how to tweak the standard rules so the right number of matches are played and all within the one day. Personally, I couldn’t think of anyone better. Could you?”

Pansy wasn’t sure what to say. Minerva’s remarks were… unusually flattering. She had never been one to compliment Pansy’s Transfiguration work during her Hogwarts days, although that might have been at least in part due to Pansy being utterly hopeless at Transfiguration. But Pansy was in general not used to receiving compliments, and she never knew how best to respond to them. Should she thank the other person? Should she wave her hand dismissively and try to deny the other person’s claim? Should she agree? All of the options available had marked advantages and disadvantages, and easy though she found it to respond, often inappropriately, to other forms of address, compliments completely baffled her.

“Um, well… would I be organising everything by myself?” she eventually decided upon asking.

“You could, if you wanted,” Minerva answered, “but it would probably be a bit much for you. I do have one suggestion for somebody to work with.”

“Who?” Pansy asked, while silently praying to please, Merlin, not let it be a Hufflepuff. Compliments were bad enough without her needing to deal with stupidity alongside.

“We want to bring as many of the more well-known icons from the war into this event as possible, to celebrate their achievements and to, through their presence, bring in more donations,” Minerva explained. “Certainly, we are hoping that many of the students in your year who fought in the war will decide to be on their appropriate house teams. As I’m sure you can guess, there is one particular person whose presence at this tournament could quite easily double the amount we raise, owing to his popularity—“

“Don’t tell me,” Pansy said, sighing with irritation at her realisation. “You want me to work with Harry Potter, don’t you?”

Again, Minerva raised her eyebrows. “I am aware that you and he were not the best of friends, owing to your close association with Draco Malfoy, presumably. But it has been ten years since your Hogwarts days, and I would hope that by now you would be able to forget any previous … disagreements, that you might have had.”

Pansy was tempted to remind Minerva again of the Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalries, and that she was the most Slytherin-ly of Slytherins, and the only way that His Royal Highness, Saint Harry The-Boy-Who-Saved-The-World Potter could be more Gryffindor would be if he was Godric himself, but she was by some rare miracle able to hold her tongue. Instead, she swallowed and asked “Do you know if he would be willing to assist in organising? And do you have any idea of how to contact him?”

“I’m not entirely sure, to answer both of your questions,” Minerva answered, not without sympathy. “Harry is unusually reclusive these days. I have managed to meet him in person, and he seemed open to the idea of a tournament when I mentioned it to him. Whether or not he would be willing to work with you, I do not know.”

“That’s comforting,” Pansy muttered. 

Minerva chose to tactfully ignore her comment. “Harry seems to have cloaked his house and concealed his address, probably because if he didn’t he would be inundated with fan-mail and unable to concentrate on his work or his life. What I would suggest is that you try to organise a meeting with him in person while he’s at his office. He works at the Ministry. Of course, you don’t have to contact him at all, if you don’t want.”

“I don’t want,” Pansy said immediately, trying to see past Minerva’s frown. “But his popularity is hard to ignore. I know about publicity, as you say. His presence would attract hundreds of spectators, and you would easily raise the funds you need if he’s there. I will arrange a meeting with him, and I accept this job.”

“I’m certain that you will perform well,” Minerva said, rendering Pansy speechless again. “Feel free to use any of the Hogwarts Quidditch facilities to help with the organisation, provided you let me know when you will be coming in, and make sure you inform me otherwise of any progress you make or if I, or any of the other teachers, can help in any way.”

“I will bear that in mind.” Pansy stood up, shook Minerva’s hand and started to make her way towards the exit.

“Pansy,” Minerva called. Pansy turned around to find Minerva looking at her, her fingertips clasped together with her chin resting on them in a way that reminded Pansy eerily of Professor Dumbledore. Perhaps whimsical chin-on-finger-resting is a trait that is acquired once one becomes a Headmaster or Headmistress?

“I know you are surprised at my asking you to do this,” Minerva said. “But we considered a number of people before eventually deciding on you. You leave a greater impression on people than you realise.”

More compliments. At least, that was what they sounded like. Pansy swallowed again, racking her brains for the right thing to say. Unable to come up with anything more clever, she finally settled on saying “Thank you, Minerva,” before exiting the grandiose room, her footsteps barely audible as she climbed silently down the spiral staircase.

~*~

Harry Potter was in a rut.

At least, he thought that was what he was in. It was hard to tell. He would definitely not be surprised if someone came up to him and told him that he was in a rut. But if he was in one, he’d been in it for the past seven years. Give or take a few months.

It was easy enough to pinpoint when his rut-that-might-not-be-a-rut had started. It was at that point, seven years ago, when he and Ginny had parted ways. It wasn’t a very harsh break-up, as far as he could recall. They had both agreed that it was for the best, and that they worked better as friends, and that was it. The next few months were a blur for Harry, but it seemed as though the next thing he knew, he was in a “rut”. And that was how it had been ever since.

He led a pleasant existence; that was certain. He worked a comfortable number of hours a week, many in exotic locations and many in the office. He made enough money to live with relative luxury in his spacious 2-bedroom flat in London. He saw Hermione, Ron, Ginny and the other Weasleys at least once a fortnight. He didn’t even have mobs of adoring fans swarming all over him like Beatles fans had done, thanks to his and Hermione’s carefully planned and executed cloaking charms at work and home. It was a good life. Indeed, he wouldn’t have noticed his “rut” at all, had he not suddenly looked at Ron and Hermione, with their two small children and their lovely, carefree and often exciting life together, and wanted something like that. Not necessarily the wife and kids, but something that brought meaning into his life and filled the emptiness. Something fulfilling that wasn’t at all related to his job. Something exciting.

A knock on the door interrupted his musings. A good thing too, since he had a report to file by the end of the day, and at the rate he was going he would have been stuck in his head for a while.

“Yes?” he called.

The door opened and Harry’s secretary, a pretty and somewhat timid blonde witch by the name of Sally, stuck her head in the door.

“Pardon me for disturbing you, Mr Potter—“ she began.

“Sally, please. I don’t believe in formality. Call me Harry,” Harry interrupted her.

“Yes, Mr Potter,” Sally replied, clearly quite startled at the interruption. “A Miss Parkinson is here to see you.”

“’A Miss Parkinson’?” Harry repeated. There was only one Parkinson that he had ever had dealings with, and those dealings had never been pleasant. Surely that now-somewhat-famous Quidditch writer wasn’t the person waiting there, now, to see him—

“She says that you and she know each other,” Sally continued. “And she’s aware that this is a surprising visit, but asks you to please hear her out.”

Harry would probably not have refused anyway, but his strong curiosity and Sally’s increasingly uncomfortable-looking facial features sealed the deal somewhat. “Very well. Send her in. And remember to take your break.”

“Of course, Mr Pot—Harry.” Sally’s head disappeared, and a moment later the slim, cold-featured, elegant form of Pansy Parkinson entered the room.

“This is a surprise,” Harry said.

“I’m sure,” Pansy replied, before indicating the chair in front of his impossibly messy desk. “May I sit?”

“You may.” Harry watched as Pansy gracefully arranged her slim body onto the small wooden chair. While still undoubtedly Pansy Parkinson, she was different to how Harry knew her at Hogwarts. Back then, she had been a short, slightly chubby, pug-faced, overbearing, rude, and frankly quite mean little snit. Hermione had certainly never liked her. There was no essence of chubbiness in Miss Parkinson now. She looked almost too thin – as though her frame didn’t quite match the roundness and the still somewhat pug-like features of her face. The full cheeks, which she had once coated in liberal amounts of barely-suitable, pasty-white, powder-y make-up, were now elegantly covered in a creamy foundation of a shade much better suited to her slightly olive-toned skin. Her fingers were slim, bony and ended with long red-painted fingers. Her posture was poised and defiant – the sort of stance that indicated that this was a woman much taller than she looked. But, and this was the greatest change of all, there was an air of vulnerability about her, which Harry had seen nothing of at Hogwarts. To be fair, if it had been there during Hogwarts days he probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but nearly ten years of carefully studying people’s faces, reading their expressions, interpreting what they were thinking before they had a chance to, more often than not, lie about it, taught Harry to see things that most people missed. And in Pansy, there was vulnerability. He could see it in the slight downward turn of her eyes. And the expensive make-up was a clue as well. Confident women, like Hermione, or Ginny, didn’t wear foundation unless they absolutely had to. But Harry was certain that Pansy would put it on every day, even if she did not intend to leave the house. For a brief second, Harry wondered what Pansy looked like without make-up.

“All right,” Pansy said, having now finished her chair-sitting ritual. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here. Correct, Potter?”

“I was,” Harry nodded. “And I think we can assume first names, seeing how we’re not at school anymore.”

“Very well,” Pansy agreed. “What is your first name again?”

Harry couldn't hold back a snort of laughter. He hadn’t known Pansy to possess wit, or much of a sense of humour while at Hogwarts.

“Anyway, _Harry_ ,” Pansy continued, “I’m sure you know that it will soon be exactly ten years since you did your thing and destroyed Voldemort.”

Harry raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was rare indeed for former Slytherins to call Voldemort by his name. Harry had certainly had enough run-ins with them on the job to know that. “I did know that, yes. I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought had Minerva McGonagall not come in here a few weeks back and reminded me.”

“Yes. Well, we had a meeting the other day. She has told you about the Quidditch tournament idea?”

“She has. I thought it was an excellent idea. Have they decided to go through with it?”

“Yes. And Minerva has asked me to organise it.”

“Really?” Harry smiled. “That was a smart choice. I read your articles often. You really know your stuff. There probably isn’t anyone better-equipped to organise this, is there?”

Pansy didn’t reply. She instead stared at him with narrowed, slightly worried eyes. Harry was confused. Had he done something wrong?

“Minerva was hoping that you would participate, as the Seeker of the Gryffindor team,” Pansy eventually said. “If you cannot, I’m sure somebody like Charlie Weasley would be more than willing, but your popularity would obviously attract more people.”

“Obviously,” Harry frowned. Minerva had mentioned his “popularity” as well when she had visited him. He was hardly going to deny that he was famous, but it didn’t help his social life at all. Most people had enough trouble trying to work out if people really liked them or not. He had the extra burden of needing to figure out if a person was only pretending to like him because of his fame.

Still, he supposed it would be selfish of him to refuse to participate in a charity event such as this one because of unwanted fame. He told Pansy he would be glad to play, and Pansy’s mouth twitched slightly in what Harry assumed was her face of triumph. _And what an epic battle you’ve just won_ , he thought, sarcastically, to himself.

“There is something else,” Pansy said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Organising this event is going to be a great responsibility, as I’m sure you can guess.”

“Well yes, of course. You’ll have a lot on your hands,” Harry agreed.

“Exactly. Minerva suggested that I find somebody else to help me with the organisation. Somebody who knows about Quidditch, has a background in organising and, if possible, an influence over the magical community, to get more people to come. Minerva was hoping that you would consider the job.”

Harry’s eyebrows, previously raised, now shot right into his fringe. “What?” he asked. “Work with you, you mean?”

“That was the idea, yes,” Pansy answered stiffly.

That was a surprise if ever there was one. The request itself wasn’t that surprising. He could organise pretty much anything that wasn’t his desk, and he often did organise events of far greater peril than charity Quidditch tournaments. But working with Pansy Parkinson? She had changed, yes, but enough to want to work with him? A Gryffindor? _The_ Gryffindor, if you believed all of that _Hogwarts, A History_ drivel?

“This wasn’t something I wanted to do,” Pansy said, as though she’d read Harry’s mind. “I am concerned that our less-than-hostile past rivalries might make matters difficult for us. But I cannot fault Minerva’s logic. You are well-known, a former Quidditch player, and a lead Auror. This work would be easy for you. So what I’m asking is would you be willing to put our past differences aside and help me?”

An interesting question indeed. Just as he had noticed changes in Pansy, Harry had come to notice changes in himself over the years too. He was no longer as forward and abrupt as he had been. There wasn’t much place for being abrupt when one was an Auror; the Wizarding world’s version of a cloaked, often-airborne ninja. He was somewhat better at controlling his temper now as well, although admittedly he like all people was prone to saying or doing astonishingly stupid, melodramatic things once that temper was lost. For the most part, however, his changes seemed to indicate that a partnership with a former Slytherin; especially one as poised and polite as Pansy Parkinson now seemed to be, was entirely possible.

And so Harry found himself leaning forward and extending his hand. “I think we could work well together,” he said. 

“Excellent.” Pansy smiled now; a wide, teeth-bearing smile that simultaneously extended every imperfect line of her face, and elevated her beauty at least twice over. She took Harry’s hand and he felt a strange little tingle where their hands connected. Probably his imagination, but he’d never imagined anything like that before. _How peculiar_ , he thought.

“Could I have you come to my office at the _Prophet_ next week, on Monday evening at 6 o’clock?” Pansy asked. “I think we’ll need to meet at least once a week between now and the tournament, but I’m not sure.”

“We can work all of that out on Monday. It’s a done deal,” Harry assured her. “I’ll contact some people that I know before then, if you like, and see if they’re interested? I can’t imagine them not being so, to be honest. This is a great opportunity to rekindle the old house rivalry.”

“As long as we don’t rekindle it too much,” Pansy remarked. “It wouldn’t do well for the event if any more punch-ups occurred.”

“Right you are,” Harry agreed, although he couldn’t tell a lie; punching the daylights out of Malfoy that one time had felt pretty damn good.

“Very good. That will be all then.” Pansy stood up and swung her handbag back onto her shoulder. Harry noticed a fake, gaudy, light-pink rose pinned to the front of it. That was interesting. Pansy Parkinson was a woman of elegance and class. She would not be seen with something as silly-looking as that among her person, unless she harboured a deep liking for or deep connection to the object in question.

“You like roses,” he said.

“Pardon me?” Pansy asked.

“I noticed the rose on your bag,” Harry explained. “It’s nice.”

After an awkward moment’s silence, Pansy responded with “I do like roses. They’re my favourite flower. Pink roses represent grace and refinement.”

“Gentility, as well,” Harry added.

Pansy cocked her head in confusion. How did he know that?

“I like roses too,” Harry explained. 

“Oh. I see.” Pansy nodded once and headed for the door.

“Pansy?” Harry called.

She turned around, careful not to trip in her heeled shoes. “Yes, Harry?”

“Please tell me that we aren’t going to have to talk to each other in such a formal way next Monday,” Harry said. “I’m not one for formality. It’s all a bit too serious for me.”

Pansy stood in silence for a moment, presumably thinking about the query. After a while, she shrugged, seemingly uncaring, and said “Whatever’s cool for you,” before shutting the door behind her.

_OK_ Harry thought, relaxing back in his chair, _she needs to work on being casual_. He was pleased about this. This tournament was definitely the sort of thing that Harry had been after. Just the right thing to get him out of his rut. If that was what it was.

~*~

“So let me get this straight,” Ron said, though it was hard to understand him through the mouthful of spaghetti bolognaise he’d just shovelled into his mouth. “Pansy Parkinson came and asked you to work with her, and you said yes?”

“Yep. That’s it,” Harry answered.

Ron took his time to chew and swallow, then shook his head and said “No, I still don’t get it.”

“I can’t really make it any clearer,” Harry said, wondering if his best mate was taking the piss.

“I think you can. Mainly by telling me why, for the love of all that is magic, you agreed to work with Pansy-bloody-Parkinson?”

“He’s already told you, Ron,” Hermione patiently scolded him as she re-entered the room, having temporarily left it to take care of her fussing baby. “It’s a charity Quidditch tournament, it could stand to raise a lot of money for the Hogwarts restoration, and Harry’s famous enough to pretty much guarantee that a lot of money will be raised if he’s involved.”

“So just be the Gryffindor Seeker,” Ron said. “There’s no reason for you to put yourself through this hell.”

“And how do you know it’s going to be hell?” Ginny asked her brother. “You barely knew the girl during Hogwarts days, and people change a lot in ten years. Need I remind you that you are now an Auror, married, and have two young children?”

“No, but that doesn’t stop me from being the resplendent and charismatic stallion that I was back at Hogwarts,” Ron argued, ignoring the spray of water shooting out of Hermione’s mouth with her responding laugh. “Surely Pansy will still be the horrible ugly Malfoy-shoe-licking cow she was back then.”

“She wasn’t that ugly,” Hermione said. “A bit fake, definitely, but not that ugly. She was a cow though. I won’t argue with you there. But people are like that as teenagers. I’m with Ginny on this one. I think she will have changed.”

“I think she has,” Harry cut in. “She was pretty uptight when she was talking to me, but perfectly civil. She even fed me a joke or two.”

“Were they funny?” Ginny asked mildly.

“I thought so,” Harry replied. “Better than most of the doss Ron feeds his kids, anyway.”

“Well, they’re hardly old enough for my better material, are they?” Ron defended. Hermione rolled her eyes.

“I think you’ll be fine working with Pansy, Harry,” Ginny said. “I know her a bit better than you all do, and she’s not that bad.”

“How do you know her?” Ron asked, eyeing her suspiciously. 

“She’s a Quidditch writer. I’m a Quidditch player. You do the arithmancy,” Ginny answered calmly, but Harry didn’t miss the quick flicker in her eyes. He’d seen that before, both in Ginny and in other people. It was panic. What was she panicked about?

“Well, I’m hardly going to stop you, am I?” Ron said. Before Harry had a chance to answer, he added “Just be careful, mate. She is a Slytherin, after all.”

“Blaise is a Slytherin,” Ginny interjected.

“And I’m still not happy that you two are together. Believe me, the day you decide to stop seeing him will be the happiest of my life. And I’m an Auror, married, and have two young children.”

Ginny’s face started to redden, which it only ever did when she was embarrassed, angry, or a combination of the two. Of course, anybody smarter than Ron would be able to tell that there was not a trace of embarrassment coursing its way through her bloodstream at that time.

“Harry, I think Hugo’s calling again,” Hermione said, looking at him with no small amount of desperation. “Could you help me with him?”

“Yes, please,” Harry answered, and they both practically sprinted out of the room. They only just managed to close the door before Ginny started yelling strings of obscenities at her brother, “moronic git” and “inconsiderate prick” being about the nicest in the mix.

~*~

Pansy yawned into her fifth coffee in as many hours as she smelled the revitalising brew. At least, it was supposed to be revitalising. But four large cups of it, double-strength, and she still felt as though she hadn’t slept the night before.

Which she hadn’t.

She had meant to get to bed before 1am, like she had been able to manage quite easily before being asked to organise this tournament, and thought she would be able to do afterwards. But it turned out that this was all going to be much trickier than she thought. Her worries about not having kept in contact with anybody were quite legitimate, it seemed. Tracking down Harry Potter had been child’s play compared to this. Nobody knew what had become of Cho Chang, for instance. Although Pansy had heard a rumour that she’d gone to live with family in China after the war. Could they fly her back for this? She was an incredible Seeker, as well as a former lover of Harry Potter. It would surely be worth the Apparition. And then there were matters of great players who had died. Cedric Diggory and Fred Weasley would have both been ideal for this. Pansy didn’t know the names of any other Hufflepuff Seekers, and as for finding another Gryffindor Beater in the same league as George Weasley? Perhaps that brother of his who was Gryffindor Seeker before Harry Potter? Would it be all right to get students who had played one position to play another? Because if so, then Pansy was almost tempted to get Ginny Weasley to be Beater.

Ginny Weasley. Now there was a particularly interesting person in Pansy’s life history.

A knock on Pansy’s office door roused her from her chain of thoughts. Dabbing carefully at the concealer she had applied under her eyes that morning, she opened the door to see Harry Potter standing there.

_Hmmm_ , Pansy thought. A quick glance at the clock on the wall told her that the time was 6:05. _Late_.

“Yeah, I know I’m late,” Harry greeted her. “And don’t look so surprised. That was obviously what you were thinking. I read people well.”

Shaking herself, Pansy managed to re-lift her dropped jaw. “I see. I guess that’s part of being an Auror, isn’t it? I’ll have to get used to it.”

“Well, we are trained to read people. But I’m very good at it. I’ll try not to creep you out too much,” Harry promised her.

“Nice to know. Would you like to come in?”

“To be honest I quite like doing desk work in the wind and the cold outside, but I suppose I’ll abide by the custom just this once,” Harry answered, the sarcasm in his voice quite heavy.

“I have a workstation set up in the middle of the Fens if you would prefer it. We’d probably have to clean the frog excrement off the desk first, though,” Pansy retorted without missing a beat. Harry was suitably impressed. This girl knew how to talk. This worked perfectly fine for him. There was nothing more awkward than a person who didn’t know what to say.

“I think I’ll pass. I’ve never been partial to East Anglia,” he eventually answered. Pansy led him into her office, which he noticed with immediate jealousy was a great deal bigger than his. The room reflected the sort of person Pansy was practically to the letter. Her desk was a solid, deep brown wood (oak, Harry would be prepared to wager) and tidy without being manically so. The floor was a plush, thick, and probably impossibly difficult to clean carpet, and the two bookcases on opposite corners were polished wood. There were two armchairs leaning against the wall, as well as the chair Pansy had now settled herself into, all three of them upholstered with sturdy-looking brown leather. Lastly, on the wall, was a framed picture of a vase of different-coloured roses.

“Nice office,” he said.

“Mmm,” Pansy replied. Harry wondered if she’d heard him. “Would you like a drink?”

“I won’t say no to a coffee. With a shot of Firewhiskey if you have it.”

“I find it strange that so many people enjoy alcohol in their coffee,” Pansy said, rising from her desk chair and walking to a small settee near the window, which contained the fundamentals for drink-making. “Coffee is a stimulant. Its purpose is to wake a person up. Alcohol is a depressant, meant to relax a person. Drinking both at the same time seems pointless.”

“Well firstly, if you think that Firewhiskey is a relaxing beverage, you’ve clearly never drunk it,” Harry replied. “Secondly, you could argue that the consumer doesn’t wish to be woken up, or relaxed. They might be in the perfect equilibrium and not want to disturb that, but want a delicious beverage. Maybe they put the alcohol into the coffee to balance it out?”

Pansy seemed to consider his proposal for a moment. She then nodded, more to herself than to him, and returned to her chair. She pushed a mug to the other side of the desk and indicated the chairs against the wall. “That’s a fair point, actually,” she said. “And I liked the way you expressed it. Very clear and precise.”

“You learn to talk like that when training young Aurors,” Harry explained, sitting in his freshly-dragged chair and taking a sip. “Just the right amount of Firewhiskey. So, how have you been these past few days?” The question had barely left his lips when he noticed, again, her eyes. They were dull today. Her lids were droopy, and her brow slightly creased. He’d bet any amount of money that there were bags under her eyes as well, but her face was again hidden behind a thin and carefully-applied mask of make-up, so no bags were visible. “You look awful,” he said, before he could stop himself.

Pansy’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Well you don’t exactly look like Britain’s Sexiest Wizard yourself, Scar-Head,” she retorted.

_Ahh_ , Harry thought, THAT’S some of the girl I remember from Hogwarts. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I meant to say that you look a bit tired. Have you been busy?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Pansy said. “This tournament is proving tougher to organise than I thought. The first thing we need is players, and I have no idea how to contact most of the possible candidates. It seems they’ve hidden themselves quite well.”

“Well, can you blame them?” Harry asked. “A lot of the students from that era fought in that war. The sudden fame they would have gotten from that would have been a real shock. I know that well enough.”

“Yeah, yeah. Famous Harry Potter. I get it,” Pansy waved him off, yawning at the same time. “This really doesn’t help me. Or us, I suppose.”

“No, I suppose not.” Harry thoughtfully stroked his chin. “However, I happen to personally know a lot of the former students and their whereabouts. Who exactly are you thinking of asking to play?”

“I drew up a list the other day. Hold on.” Pansy lifted herself off the chair and walked over to one of the bookshelves. She came back with a small leather-bound journal, which Harry could see had the words “10-year Quidditch” scrawled on it in gold lettering.

“OK,” Pansy murmured, opening the book. “So here I’ve got a page reserved for each team’s players. I’ve written possible people to contact, and ticked the people I personally know or have managed to track down.”

She passed him the book and Harry had a read of the names. She’d listed about ten names for each team, and Harry couldn’t fault her decisions, for the most part. Roger Davies was a pretty obvious choice for the Ravenclaw captain – he’d had plenty of practice after all. For his own team, he saw that she had written down names of a number of people he had played alongside, including the standouts in his own original team – bar Fred, of course. She’d written “Beater?” in brackets beside Ginny’s name, which again struck him as interesting. He’d never considered Ginny as a potential Beater before, but thinking about it, it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. If anything, she could communicate with George better than just about anybody he knew. The distinct lack of Zacharias Smith in the Hufflepuff team drew nothing but glee out of Harry. He was a bit surprised at her writing Cho Chang’s name down. Cho had been a very good Seeker, as Harry could easily tell anyone from all of the times he had dreamily watched her during past games, but the Seeker before her, Mark Jolly, had apparently been legendary. Perhaps Pansy was restricting participation as much as possible to people who had been around while she was at school? Lastly, Harry noticed with wry amusement that all of the Slytherin names had ticks next to them, while the only tick on any of the names in the other three houses was that next to his own name.

“I can’t tell for the life of me which house you belonged to,” he said.

“Oh, shut it,” Pansy snapped back, but Harry thought he saw a brief twitch of a smile. “What do you think? Do you know any of their whereabouts?”

“I know most of these peoples’ whereabouts, actually,” Harry answered, scanning his eyes across the list again to double-check. “My ex-girlfriend, Cho Chang, might be a problem. She’s been in Asia for a few years. But a friend of hers works in the department next to me, so it should be all right.”

“Great,” Pansy said.

“I think your decisions here are really good as well. There’s no doubt you’re good at this.” Harry looked over at Pansy and saw that she’d gotten quite tight-lipped all-of-a-sudden. Her eyes had that narrowed, worried look that he’d definitely seen once before. He wondered, again, what he had said. Had he not just given her reason _not_ to worry?

He decided to press on rather than ask. “I see you’ve got Graham Montague here as the captain for Slytherin. What about Marcus Flint? He was captain for longer, and the team did pretty well under his instruction.”

“You’re right,” Pansy agreed, her previous anxious expression now completely gone. Harry’s confusion was short-lived, however, as she continued talking. “Flint was an excellent captain. But he was nasty. The Slytherin team is infamous for not having female players, and he was the driving force behind that. He would also teach unfair tactics, and I’ve heard that he hasn’t been above doing that in his post-Hogwarts career either. Montague is much less nasty.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” said Harry, turning his attention back to the book. “Although to be honest, saying that a Slytherin is nasty is like saying that a Flobberworm is unintelligent.”

“Oi!” Harry looked up again in surprise to see Pansy looking back at him with what was now an expression of defiance. “We’re not all that bad. And being a nasty Slytherin is much better than being a Gryffindor goody-goody all of the time.”

“You think we’re goody-goodies?” Harry asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll have you know we broke plenty of rules while we were at school.”

“Oh my word, stop the presses!” Pansy said, raising her hands so flamboyantly that even the most idiotic of village idiots could tell that she was mocking him. “Gryffindors breaking rules? Surely the world and everything around it will end!”

“Give it a rest, Parkinson,” Harry bit back at her. Pansy registered his using her last name. “I’m just saying; we weren’t what everybody thought we were.”

“Really?” Pansy asked. “So you weren’t all the teacher’s favourites? You weren’t all the ones who could just about get away with murder, because all you had to do was bat your eyelashes at the teachers and they would say ‘well, surely he means well, as he’s a Gryffindor; the _best_ , most _noble_ , most incredibly _brave_ of the houses—“

“Or maybe it was that you lot _didn’t_ get special treatment, because everybody knew that you were all just a bunch of worthless Voldemort-lovers,” Harry interrupted her.

Pansy was silent. Harry knew immediately that he’d gone too far. Again, any village idiot could have told him that. Despite her silence, the pressure in the room rang so loudly in Harry’s ears that he felt like he was surrounded by boiling kettles, each screaming that they were done. Pansy’s face was cold; looking straight into his eyes, completely expressionless. But her fists, Harry noticed, were clenched so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. 

“I—“ Harry started to say, but Pansy whipped abruptly around and lifted herself from her chair with such graceful cat-like agility that it struck Harry for a flash of a second that she could be a dancer. Pansy strode across the room, flung the door open and pointed to it.

“Get out,” she said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but Harry heard it as clearly as he would if she had shouted in his ear. “Get out and don’t come back.”

Harry opened his mouth, but, he realised, he had nothing to say. So he closed it again, stood up, and walked to the door. As he brushed past Pansy he caught a whiff of a smell; a perfume, smelling of … heh. He shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Roses.

~*~

“You actually said that?” Ginny asked, staring at him as though there was a massive spider on his forehead, and she wasn’t sure how to tell him, and she herself was an arachnophobe.

“Yeah, I know, I’m normally much better-controlled, and that time I wasn’t, and I don’t know why. It was stupid. I’m stupid. There’s no need to tell me,” Harry assured her.

“Seriously? And deny me the opportunity to tell you something that I’ve been dying to tell you for the past twelve years?”

“Ginny, you _have_ been telling me I’m stupid for the past twelve years.”

“Yeah, but this time there’s really, really good evidence for it.”

“Arrggghhh.” Harry banged his head against Ginny’s kitchen table, nearly upsetting his cup of tea in the process. Ginny quickly rescued the endangered cup, placing it carefully on the kitchen counter.

“What do I do?” Harry asked after a brief moment of therapeutic head-banging. “I need to do something. She needs my help for this – super reporter she might be, but she’s never had to find non-celebrities before. It would take her ages and I could get replies from all of them in less than a day. But it’s all for naught if she won’t take my help.”

“Mmm,” Ginny agreed, her high ponytail bobbing gently up and down as she nodded. “I know enough about Pansy to know that her stubbornness surpasses even Hermione’s.”

“Seriously? The woman who managed to make her Pureblood husband let her give birth to his son in a Muggle hospital? Pansy is more stubborn than that?”

“Well, put it this way,” Ginny answered. “Remember about eight years ago, when we were still together, and that enormous ten-page spread on “The many fashion choices of the Harpies’ hottest member”, featuring me wearing some of the most atrocious outfits either of us had ever seen?”

“You only thought they were atrocious because most of them were dresses,” Harry argued.

“ _Pink_ dresses, Harry! With frills!”

“I thought the frills brought out the puffiness in your lips.”

“You’re going to pay for saying that—no; we’re getting off-subject here.” Ginny took a deep breath. “The point is she got me to do it.”

“Wow, really? That was her?” Harry reached across the table for his tea. “There I was thinking you’d been sniffing performance-enhancing potions or something.”

“I’d never cheat for my career. So anyway, what you need to do is de-stubborn her.”

“OK,” Harry said, nodding thoughtfully. “How do I do that? Should I apologise? I’m good at that.”

“An apology is a given. But simple apologies aren’t enough for Pansy Parkinson. You need something a bit more … particular, than that.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked, his brow furrowing in confusion.

“Well, think. You’ve probably figured out a million and one things about her by now, knowing you,” Ginny said. “What do you know?”

Harry thought for a moment. Despite his talents for figuring people out, Pansy was proving to be a bit of an enigma. She was smart, yes. And quick-witted. And hot-tempered. Definitely hot-tempered. And that hot temper seemingly had rubbed off on him last night. She had a response for every mean, or cheeky, or somewhat lame comment he gave her, but nice comments for some reason got her tongue-tied. Perhaps she was not used to getting compliments. Although he couldn’t imagine why. Pansy was also chic, and sophisticated. Her outfits, her make-up, her presence – all polished, all perfectly in place. Except for the occasional little bit – little petal – of disorder.

And then Harry had it.

“I’ve got to go,” Harry said, jumping out of his chair. “I’ve got to go … buy something.”

“What in the name of all that is magical could you need to buy?” Ginny asked, taken aback by his sudden action.

Harry had already reached the door, opened it, and almost exited. “A gift,” he shouted back at her before letting the door shut behind him.

~*~

“Coffee,” Pansy whispered hoarsely, stepping into the _Prophet_ sports offices. The hangover she was sporting was a whopper. It had hit her last night, as she’d written down a list of things she would need to get done in the next five weeks, and just how much work it was going to take with her now having to do it by herself. And rather than, say, got started, she’d headed straight to her wine stash.

_Good wine that was, too_ , Pansy now thought to herself, before her stomach lunged uncomfortably.

“Here you are, Miss Parkinson.” One of the young interns appeared by her side, handing her a cup of refreshing brew. “I added some Hangover Potion to it,” he said. “It will help. I know that well enough.”

Pansy took a sip, and the combined taste of the coffee and the rejuvenating kick of the potion improved the fuzzy feeling in her head and stomach immensely. “Thank you for this, Derek,” she said to the intern. He was a good kid, she had to admit. Surprisingly clever as well, considering how he’d been in Hufflepuff. “Any owl post for me?”

“Just one letter,” Derek answered. He led her to his intern-sized (tiny) section of desk and picked a letter off the top of a large pile of morning _Prophet_ s. Pansy gasped. The letter looked like, well, a letter. It was nothing special. But attached to it was a single, long-stemmed, rich buttery yellow rose.

“Looks like you have an admirer,” Derek said, smiling.

“A friend,” Pansy corrected him, pulling the rose off the letter. “Yellow roses mean friendship. Friendship and caring.”

“Hmm. Well that’s nice, isn’t it?” Derek asked.

“Yes,” Pansy agreed, absentmindedly plucking the topmost _Prophet_ from the pile on Derek’s desk. “Yes it is.”

She left Derek to stare after her as she walked to her office. She closed the door and placed the rose inside a long, thin vase she kept in there, along with several other vases of various shapes and sizes. This done, she sat at her desk and peeled back the seal on the back of the envelope. The piece of parchment inside was small, and its message brief:

_Pansy,_

_I don’t need to tell you what yellow roses mean. But understand that I know what they mean too._

_I’m sorry. What I said was unprofessional and I didn’t mean it in the slightest. I didn’t mean any of it. If all Slytherins are nasty, after all, then I fail to understand why you were one._

_Please forgive me,_

_Harry Potter_

Pansy didn’t know what to think. She looked from the letter, to the rose standing prettily in its vase, then back to the letter again. Did Harry Potter consider her his friend? They barely knew each other. They’d only been in contact twice since the end of Hogwarts. There really hadn’t been much time for any friendship to develop.

But there was definitely something there. Pansy could feel it, and clearly he could as well. It was unsettling how well he could read her. Pansy had devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to make herself unreadable. It was something she’d had to do as a child. She couldn’t have her father knowing what she was really thinking. And as an adult, having a mask was the best way of keeping people from finding out what was going on inside her. 

But then Potter comes in, and straight off the bat he sees past everything she’d spent most of her life building up. He seemed to understand her straight away; as though he’d known her for some time. He knew how to talk to her, and he could tell what she was thinking. And, as was clear by the rose, he knew how to apologise to her. Nobody had ever apologised to her in that way before, but it was perfect. It was special, and it showed that he had paid attention to her. He’d noticed the rose on her handbag at that first meeting, and, unusually enough, he also knew the meanings of the different rose colours. If he’d sent her a rose of a particular colour, knowing full well what its meaning was, he probably meant what he was saying by sending it to her. 

And, oddly enough, Pansy felt the same thing. Strange though it was after only two meetings, the second of which not exactly ending well, she felt as though she and Harry Potter were friends.

~*~

“What is this called again?” Ron asked, fumbling with the controller.

“It’s called a video game,” Harry told him. “Basically, we need to move these blokes to these areas and shoot these other blokes. If we shoot more of them than they shoot us, we win.”

“All right, I think I get it. But what are these stupid-looking things they’re carrying?”

“Those are called ‘guns’, Ron. And you’re right; they are stupid.”

A rapping noise at the window caught Harry’s attention. He left Ron to figure out how to make the gun fire and opened the window. An eagle owl hopped onto the sill and elegantly extended its leg, upon which two things were attached: A letter, and a single rose.

“That’s a bit girly, isn’t it?” Ron asked, seeing the flower in Harry’s hand when he returned to the living room.

“Well, roses aren’t exactly the most butch of flowers, no,” Harry agreed. “It explains why my mother loved them, not my father. She was definitely the more feminine of my two parents. And you should be grateful. Without that influence you’d still be wondering what to call your daughter.”

“I’m feeling your sarcasm, mate. So what does that colour mean? What is that colour, anyway?”

Harry considered the delicate petals of the rose for a moment. “This is peach,” he told Ron. “It means a few things.” He glanced at the contents of the short letter once again and, smiling, looked back at the rose. “But I’d say that in this case, it represents sincerity, gratefulness, and thanks.”

~*~YOU MAY CUT HERE~*~

OK, Pansy admitted it: She was nervous.

Which was pretty rare for her, or at least it normally was, if she ignored the past few weeks. She raked a hand, now with blue-painted fingernails, through her perfectly-straightened short black hair. 

Her nervousness this time wasn’t quite as warranted as it had been before her going into Minerva McGonagall’s office. This time it was 5:58pm on a Monday afternoon, and she was waiting, again, for Harry Potter. Her letter had presumably reached him, since the owl had returned to her empty-handed (or empty-footed, as it were), but he’d sent her no indication that he had received it, or that he felt positively or negatively towards it. He must have understood the rose. And surely he thought it was all right, since he had apologised to her beforehand and given her the yellow rose, which she’d had to throw out that morning. She never enjoyed throwing out roses, but when they died, they died. She’d made sure to throw it out in a bin that wasn’t in her office though, so it wouldn’t be obvious to him that she’d thrown it out. Hopefully he would think that she’d just taken it home.

_Merlin_ , she thought, _listen to me. I’m acting like a 15-year-old girl about to go on her first date. This is ridiculous behaviour, and you’re much more mature than that. Snap out of it_.

Somebody knocked on the door, and Pansy nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked at the clock. It was one minute past 6 o’clock. She took a deep breath and strode over to the door. Before she could chicken out, she flung it open.

Harry Potter was standing at the door. He looked messy in a way that she would never allow herself to be. It was raining pretty heavily outside and he’d clearly been in the direct downpour without the aid of an umbrella or Water-repelling Charm. His hair was as black and dishevelled as ever and now also shiny with wetness. The white button-down business shirt he was wearing in lieu of robes had turned see-through and was clinging to his body in a way that Pansy had to admit was quite aesthetically pleasing. He was holding a briefcase in one hand.

They looked (well, stared) at each other for what seemed to Pansy like an obscenely long time, before Harry broke the silence with, “It’s kind of wet out there.”

“And here I thought you’d jumped into a lake or something,” Pansy replied without thinking.

Another brief silence, then Harry smiled at her. “I think we’re okay. May I come in and apply a Drying Charm?”

“No. I want you to catch a cold,” Pansy answered, unable to keep a small smile from appearing on her face. She stood aside and he entered.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Please.” Harry had put his briefcase down, taken his wand out of the back pocket of his jeans and was now applying it to his person. 

“So, what have you done this week?” Harry asked.

“I had a meeting with Minerva,” Pansy answered. “I told her what we’ve done so far.”

“Really?” Harry asked casually. “Including the fight? And the roses?”

Pansy’s hand jolted and the coffee pot she had been holding fell to the floor. It smashed on the ground, leaving a mess of hot brown liquid seeping into the plush carpet. 

“Fuck,” Pansy cursed quietly, kneeling on the ground to pick up the broken pieces. She nicked her finger on a sharp edge.

“ _Reparo!_ ” came Harry’s voice from behind her. The broken pieces flew away from Pansy’s fingers and zoomed back together. The fixed coffee pot landed gently back on the desk, and before Pansy knew it, Harry was kneeling beside her.

“You’ve cut yourself,” he murmured, seeing the tiny trail of blood running down her finger.

“It’s OK,” Pansy mumbled back, trying to hide her finger. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Harry said, his voice taking on a no-nonsense quality that she hadn’t seen in him before. He placed a hand on Pansy’s arm and, tugging gently, pulled her hand towards him. Her skin tingled where he touched her, just like it had when they had shaken hands before. Her breath hitched, and it struck her suddenly just how intimate this situation was. He waved his wand gently over her hand, and before long it was as good as new.

“I’m sorry,” Pansy said quietly.

Harry shook his head. “Don’t be. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s over. History. Let’s forget about it and move on.”

Pansy nodded quietly. “OK,” she agreed, then shook herself. What was wrong with her? She was acting as pathetically as she had promised herself years ago that she would never act like again. She had to snap out of it. She had to put her mask back on.

“So,” she found herself saying, standing up and striding over to her desk. “What did you do this week?”

If Harry was confused about her change in manner, he didn’t show it. He pointed his wand at the coffee stain on the carpet and followed her to the desk. “I got in contact with all of the people you want to compete.”

“Oh yes? Did you get many responses?”

“I got _every_ response,” Harry said. He brought his briefcase to her desk, opened it and pulled out a thick folder containing scraps of parchment, each scrap containing an enthusiastically affirmative ‘Yes! I’d love to do it!’ Not one person had declined his invitation. He’d found it heart-warming that they were all so eager. It would prove to be a most fantastic tournament if this level of enthusiasm could be maintained.”

“Brilliant!” Pansy exclaimed, clutching her hands together excitedly. “That’s absolutely fantastic. Have you discussed practice schedules with the four captains?”

“Yes, I have,” Harry answered. He extracted a different piece of parchment from his briefcase and read it quickly. “I’ve given them the addresses of the other members of their teams, and told them that in the weeks before the tournament they will be able to practice once a week on the Hogwarts pitch, and as many times as they want on other pitches. I owled McGonagall about it, and she’s agreed to the schedule that we discussed. Gryffindor are practising on Tuesday evenings, Hufflepuff on Wednesdays, Ravenclaw on Fridays and Slytherin on Saturdays.”

“Why is Slytherin practising on a weekend day?” Pansy asked.

“Because Montague had a cry about it,” Harry answered matter-of-factly. “He seemed worried that if his team practiced on a weekday evening they wouldn’t be as well prepared, with visibility issues and the like. The fact that all of the teams would be similarly disadvantaged fell on deaf ears, so Saturday he gets. McGonagall agreed to it; it’s no big deal.”

Pansy considered arguing about it. It was her old team, but it didn’t seem fair for Slytherin to get, potentially, a whole day on the Hogwarts pitch, while the other teams would get four hours, tops, before it got too dark for them to see the Quaffle. But any arguing would probably be futile, so she decided not to press the issue. 

“Have you thought at all about prizes?” she asked instead.

“I have, actually,” Harry said. “I thought that maybe every player could get a Snitch especially made for them, and that the winning team could each get a small version of the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup.”

“I like that idea,” Pansy agreed. “For one thing, it’s not too gaudy.”

“Exactly. I’m not one for gaudiness.”

“Won’t all of those Snitches be expensive, though?” Pansy asked. “I mean, it depends on whether or not they’re made with actual gold like the prize Snitches tend to be made of, or with brass like normal game-play Snitches. But either way, it takes some skill to make them and they cost money.”

“That is true,” Harry agreed. “But I think I have a solution. Ginny’s fiancé, your old mate Blaise Zabini, is a Snitch manufacturer. One of the best new recruits, according to his superiors. I asked him about it, and he’s agreed to make twenty-eight engraved Snitches of brass for this competition, and to cover all of the costs himself. He says it’s the least he can do after what Hogwarts did for him.”

“Wow,” Pansy murmured, resting back in her chair. “I haven’t seen Blaise Zabini in years… but wait. You say he’s Ginny Weasley’s fiancé now? The last I heard she was dating you.”

“She was, yeah,” Harry nodded, “but we broke up about seven years ago.”

“Really?” Pansy asked. “Who broke up with whom?”

Her question seemed unusual, and quite inappropriate. Harry considered refusing to answer, but looking at Pansy again, he thought, why bother refusing? It wasn’t as if the truth was embarrassing. And anyway, he and Pansy were friends now.

“It was mutual,” he told her. “We both agreed that it was for the best.”

“Interesting,” Pansy said, frowning in thought. There was silence for a brief moment, until she asked, “Do you miss her?”

“Do I miss her?” Harry repeated. He considered the question. Was it possible to miss somebody who he still saw often? And if it was, was it her specifically that he missed, or the difference in their relationship?

“I do miss her,” he found himself saying to Pansy then. “I see her all the time, so it’s not as if she’s not around. We’re still really good friends. But I miss her in a different sense. I miss having her there, as somebody that was more special to me than anybody else, you know? Somebody who was almost a part of me. We had that, for a while. But we grew apart. I guess that’s inevitable, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Pansy shrugged. “I wouldn’t really know.”

“No?” Harry asked. “Have you never had that feeling?”

“I haven’t,” Pansy answered. “I don’t think everybody experiences that feeling.”

“Maybe not,” Harry said. “But you will, one day. You’re special. It will happen.”

Pansy was silent. She was regarding Harry with that same expression of worried suspicion she wore every time he said something nice about her. It was downright strange. He’d seen people react to compliments by smiling and saying ‘thank you’, or by tossing their hair back and agreeing with him, or by blushing and disagreeing. But no reaction at all? That was weird, and it was particularly weird coming from someone who always had a response to anything else he could throw at her.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked her.

“What?” Pansy asked, confused.

“Do you want me to stop?” Harry repeated. “You don’t seem to like it when I say something nice about you. Does it creep you out?”

“Um,” Pansy answered, stalling for time. Nobody had asked her about this weird habit of hers before. Ultimately, she believed that nobody noticed. But of course, Harry Potter notices everything. She shouldn’t have been surprised that he would pick up on this flaw of hers.

It wasn’t that she didn’t try to respond to compliments. She did try. Whenever somebody delivered a compliment to her she would rack her brain trying to think of an appropriate response, but no response ever came. Most people were taught, by a parent or something, how to receive compliments. But she’d never had that. She’d never learnt how to react to any comment that portrayed her as being someone positive, or unique.

Or special.

“You don’t have to stop,” Pansy told Harry in the end. 

“Are you sure?” Harry asked. “I mean, it’s a strange thing to be uncomfortable about, but it does make you uncomfortable.”

“It’s fine,” Pansy said, looking at him distantly. “Really.”

After a moment’s considering her, Harry shrugged and stood up. “Well in that case, I’ll be off. Same time next week?”

“Sure,” Pansy agreed, standing up as well. “Have a good week.”

“Will do. Goodbye, Pansy.” Harry opened her office door and exited, leaving Pansy confused. That meeting had gone better than last week, but Pansy had a very vague feeling that Harry was unhappy with her. She wondered why that was. Was there something more about her that he wanted to know?

~*~

_Harry,_  
Thank you for your confirmation on the prizes, and please give Blaise my regards. Will he be doing the winning team’s cups as well, or do we need to get somebody else for that?  
I’ve been drawing up rough drafts for the games. I think each game will have to be played for an hour, maximum, in order to get them all in during the day. I’ve sent my drafts along with this letter. Let me know what you think.  
I also want to know what you think about catering? I thought that there could be some kind of dinner in the Great Hall after the tournament is over, but I’m not sure what to do about lunch. Should we leave the crowd to their own devices and just organise lunch for the players?   
Pansy 

_Pansy,_  
Blaise sends his regards to you in return, and says that he has a mate who makes trophies who would be happy to make seven miniatures, free of charge. He was an old Hogwarts student as well.  
Your drafts look fine, and I agree with you about the games not lasting for longer than an hour, although we might need to fight some Quidditch traditionalists before we’re allowed to do it, but I think that if you stare them down long enough they’ll give in. Your format is good as well, and I notice it is similar to the yearly house competitions. Six heats where the teams all play each other, followed by a runners-up final, then a final between the two strongest teams in the end. Eight games in total. I think that’s easily do-able, provided we start quite early in the morning and each team doesn’t play more than two games in a row. We should talk more about the order of contestants on Monday.  
I’m not too sure about catering, but I think that we would be overstretching our friendship with the Hogwarts house-elves by asking them to make lunch and dinner for thousands of potential guests. An after-tournament feast sounds like a good idea, but leaving lunch to the audience’s free-will would probably be best. It would keep ticket prices down as well.  
I’ll see you on Monday. Let me know if you need me to do anything.  
Harry 

~*~

“You’re three minutes late,” Pansy scolded him, holding the door open.

“My apologies,” Harry replied, entering the office and heaving the giant rucksack he was carrying on the floor. “I was on an away mission this weekend, and I only just got back. Hence the attire.” He spread his arms wide, giving Pansy a clear view of the Muggle hiking gear he had on.

“Unacceptable,” Pansy said unsympathetically. “By this stage you should have your priorities straight, and organising a charity event is far more important than policing the Wizarding world.”

Harry would have thought that she was being completely serious, if not for signs of strain on her face indicating that she was trying to control herself from breaking into a smile.

“It won’t happen again. I promise,” he said, taking off his bulky jacket and settling into his normal chair. “So, what’s new?”

“I’ve been deflecting letters in your absence,” Pansy informed him. “Does Montague normally send you an owl a day?”

“On average, yes,” Harry assented. “Sometimes it’s three a day, sometimes it’s one every two days. They’re all long and they all contain some sort of complaint. What’s he on about this time?”

“He thinks that Slytherin should be allowed to practice at Hogwarts on Sundays as well. He says this is because his is the only team without access to another pitch.”

“Really? Despite the fact that three of his team members are on professional reserve squads and their Seeker has a full-sized pitch on his family’s private estate?” Harry pretended to ponder the query for a moment. “Is there any way of saying ‘fuck off’ to him that doesn’t seem too direct or impolite?”

“Don’t worry. I threatened to replace him with Marcus Flint if he didn’t back off. It seems to have worked. I haven’t gotten anything from him today.”

“Be warned. He might just be taking a day or two to compose his most hate-filled letter yet,” Harry told her. “Now, have you made any further decisions about the game order?”

“Yes, I have,” Pansy confirmed. She produced a piece of parchment from the top of a neatly-stacked pile on her desk and handed it over to Harry. He read it carefully:

_Possible Schedule:_  
8:00-9:00 – Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff  
9:15-10:15 – Ravenclaw vs. Slytherin  
10:30-11:30 – Slytherin vs. Hufflepuff  
11:45-12:45 – Ravenclaw vs. Gryffindor  
12:45-1:45 – Lunch  
1:45-2:45 – Hufflepuff vs. Ravenclaw  
3:00-4:00 – Gryffindor vs. Slytherin  
4:15-5:15 – Losers’ play-off  
5:30-6:30 – Final   
6:30-7:00 – Award ceremony  
7:00 – Dinner 

“Pretty good,” Harry said. “Can I make one suggestion?”

“Of course, but I probably won’t take it.”

“Fair enough – it’s your tournament. It might be a good idea to have a morning tea break between the second and third games, or else Slytherin will be playing two games in quick succession, which would be a bit rough on them.”

“Why Harry Potter, I’m amazed,” Pansy said, laying a hand on the centre of her chest. “Are you considering the well-being of the Slytherin team? How very chivalrous of you. I didn’t think you cared.”

“Oh, now that’s just harsh,” Harry said, looking at her as though she’d scarred him for life. “I am the most chivalrous of beings. And just because I’m worried that Montague will send a tirade of complaints to both of us if we don’t have some kind of break in between his two games, it doesn’t mean that I’m not being chivalrous this time.”

“I knew it,” Pansy said, shaking her head. “Well, how about this. We put a break in, but to eliminate any chance of him legitimately complaining, we swap around the first two games? That’s a good idea actually, because then the audience will be waiting a while before you and your tirade of Gryffindor celebrities start to play.”

“How gracious of you,” Harry remarked dryly.

“I rather think so. Now, about the catering. I’m with you one-hundred percent on the audience getting lunch for their own lazy selves—“

“—as long as you don’t refer to them as ‘their own lazy selves’ in public,” Harry cut in.

“Whatever. But I’ve spoken to the House elves, and they’re perfectly happy to make lunch for the team members, and they’re already preparing for the dinner feast.” Pansy rubbed a few fingers back and forth along her temple. “I’d say that we should be prepared for Snitch-shaped delicacies galore.”

“Ron’s mother made me a Snitch-shaped cake once,” Harry remarked.

“Really?”

“Yup. She’s given me quite a few Snitch-related articles over the years.”

“That’s nice of her. So I guess she was a bit like a mother to you? That must have been nice.”

“It was. I’d never had a proper mother-figure before her. It’s good to feel like I have a mother, for once—“ Harry stopped talking. He could have talked about Molly Weasley for a good while yet, but Pansy’s face had taken on an odd quality. She looked … sad. That was odd. He’d seen her worried before, and confused, and even something bordering on happy. But he’d never registered sadness in her face before, and that struck him as strange, because it occurred to him, right then, that Pansy Parkinson was definitely a sad person.

“So, erm. You said you talked to the House elves?” Harry asked her.

Pansy nodded. “I visited them last week. They’re extraordinary, you know. I hadn’t been down to that kitchen in over ten years, and most of them still remembered me as though I’d only visited them yesterday.”

“They are pretty extraordinary,” Harry agreed, thinking about Dobby. “You used to visit them, then?”

“All the time,” Pansy nodded. “I’m very fond of House elves. Not as into the whole House elf rights thing as your friend Granger is—“

“—was,” Harry corrected her. “Hermione’s grown up a bit since then.”

“That’s good to know,” Pansy said. “I could never like Granger for doing what she was doing. I mean, I was pretty horrible during Hogwarts anyway” (Harry snorted) “but even so. I know enough about House elves to know that what she was proposing was downright cruelty.”

“I agree,” Harry said. “Did you have a House elf?”

“Yes.” Pansy nodded. “Her name was Buffy. She used to look after me when I was a child. She’d make pink cupcakes with sugar roses on them for me, because she knew how much I love roses. We became good friends.”

Harry nodded. “I had a House elf as well, who was a friend of mine. His name was Dobby. I owned one for a while as well, Kreacher, but he was pretty old. He died not too long ago.”

“Buffy died when I was thirteen,” Pansy said. “She was old too, so I sort of expected it. I think she knew it was coming, because the last thing she said to me was something like ‘Buffy loves you, Little Miss Pansy. She wants Little Miss Pansy to remember this’.”

“She sounds as though she cared for you a lot,” Harry remarked.

“She had to, I suppose. I was one of her masters,” Pansy replied. “But I think she would have loved me despite that. Buffy…” Pansy looked away from Harry, turning her eyes toward the painting of roses on her wall. “I miss her,” she said quietly.

Harry had noticed when he had seen Pansy a few weeks ago, that there was vulnerability in her. Vulnerability that she clearly tried to hide with her prim and proper manner, but vulnerability none-the-less. But now, looking at her, he felt as though he was truly seeing her, properly, for the first time. The carefully blank face, the impeccable posture, the poise; that was all gone. Now her eyes were wide, blank, and staring at that picture as though willing it to bring her something that would make everything better. Her posture had relaxed, just slightly, but enough for Harry to notice. Her arms were lying loosely over her crossed legs, looking about ready to grab and hug herself, should the need arise. And what Harry saw was someone so sad and lost that it was no wonder she had built up that pretence of confidence. She was protecting herself.

But from what? What could Pansy Parkinson, successful Quidditch writer and former Hogwarts graduate, possibly need to protect herself from?

~*~

“I’ve got to tell you,” Harry said, having just swallowed his last bit of dinner, “that nobody does scrambled eggs and toast quite as badly as you, Gin.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ginny argued, taking a bite of over-buttered toast, “Blaise’s version is hard to beat. He overcooks the eggs even more than me, and you know there’s nothing I like more than eggs so tough that they’re impossible to chew.”

“How do you two survive?” Harry asked. “You could quite easily snatch first and second place in a ‘Worst Cook in the World’ competition. What do you eat?”

“Take-out,” Ginny answered. “Or Mum brings us leftover stew. That stuff has been keeping us nutritionally-balanced for six years now.”

“I’m sure Molly would be thrilled with the news.” Harry took both of their plates to the sink and pointed his wand threateningly at the sponge, which quivered for a second in fear before leaping up and starting to scrub hard at Harry’s plate.

“Use detergent!” Harry said exasperatedly, swishing his wand in the direction of the bottle Ginny kept there. The bottle got the message and poured some of its contents into the sink for the sponge to use. The sponge, for what it was worth, seemed grateful. Harry sighed and turned back to Ginny.

“I’ll thank you not to abuse my cleaning utensils,” she reprimanded him.

“Sorry,” Harry apologised, collapsing back into his chair. “Your sponge would have been spared the heartache if I wasn’t so tired. Wood’s just like I remember him. A total slave-driver.”

“I’m kind of glad I was never captained by him while I was at Hogwarts,” Ginny admitted.

It was Sunday evening, nearly a week after Harry and Pansy had last met, and Harry and Ginny had just spent most of the day doing drill after drill at the Puddlemere United stadium. Harry was feeling pretty confident, he had to say. Ginny was Chasing for the team, just like she did on a professional basis, and Charlie Weasley had been brought in to Beat in Fred’s place. It was a brilliant choice on his and Pansy’s part, because Charlie was a natural and George worked as well with him as he ever had with Fred. Everybody else on the team was playing as though they hadn’t stopped playing since they’d left Hogwarts (which, for a few of them, was the case). Harry hadn’t seen the Sunday practice as being strictly necessary, but Wood was adamant and Harry knew better than to disagree with him. It wasn’t as though he’d had any better plans for the day anyway.

Having said that, he was exhausted when they were done, and when Ginny invited him over for badly-cooked dinner he couldn’t say ‘Oh Merlin yes please!’ fast enough.

“Where’s Blaise?” he asked Ginny then.

“Still at work, I’d imagine,” Ginny answered. “He’s gotten pretty enthused about this tournament. He reckons the Snitches he’s making are some of the finest he’s ever done.”

“Brilliant,” Harry said. “Do you think he’d be up for making eight more for the actual matches? I forgot to ask him about it, and Pansy wrote to me the other day about where they were going to get a Quaffle, two Bludgers and eight Snitches. I figured we could just use the school Quaffle and Bludgers, but apparently not.”

“Well it is a pretty important tournament,” Ginny said. “You might as well at least seek out new balls for the occasion. I’ll see if I can donate some of ours to you.”

“You’d be a legend if you could do that. We’ll make sure to put your team’s name on the sponsor list.”

Hooray for recognition.” Ginny jabbed her wand in the direction of the kettle, and it flew to the sink to ready itself for tea-making. 

“How is Pansy?” Ginny asked. “She hasn’t been around our grounds lately, so I haven’t really seen her.”

“She’s … all right,” Harry answered. He was pretty sure that was the truth. After Pansy had come out of her trance on Monday, the pair of them continued working as though nothing had happened. When he’d left her office she’d said goodbye quite cheerfully, and their owl correspondence during the week was the same as ever. But Harry couldn’t forget how scarily sad and empty Pansy had looked for those few brief moments. He’d wanted to do something for her then. Offer words of comfort, or a soothing cup of coffee, or even a friendly hug. Something that might help to reassure her that he was there and he cared. And he did care. He and Pansy were friends now, after all.

“She told me something,” Harry found himself saying to Ginny.

“Oh yes?” she asked, straightening up in her chair. “What was it?”

“She was telling me about an old House elf of hers,” Harry answered. “Buffy, she said the elf’s name was.”

“Ahh yes, Buffy,” Ginny nodded in understanding. “Pansy told me about her once, when she was interviewing me.”

“Oh right. Pansy seemed really attached to that elf.”

“Well it’s not surprising,” Ginny remarked.

“Why not?” Harry asked. “Pansy came from a hierarchical Pureblood family. Surely she would have been taught that the House elves were servants, wouldn’t she?”

Ginny regarded him with confusion. “Don’t you know about Pansy’s past?” she asked him.

Harry was surprised at the question. “No,” Harry answered. “Should I know about it?”

“Well it’s pretty well-known. Although I suppose since you were raised by Muggles, you probably missed the bulk of the story.”

“What story?” Harry asked. He found himself getting impatient, but he couldn’t help it. The chance to find out more about Pansy was a rare one indeed.

Ginny thought for a moment before answering. “Okay. Well, Pansy’s been relatively well-known in the Wizarding world since she was born. Her mother was a really well-known and popular Quidditch player; one of the first female players to make it as far in their professional career as she did. Anything relating to her and her family was in the _Prophet_ practically by law.”

“That explains Pansy’s love for Quidditch,” Harry remarked.

“And her love for journalism,” Ginny added. “Anyway, Pansy’s mother had been famous for a good five years before Pansy was born, and she continued to play Quidditch when Pansy was a baby. She had to stop when Pansy was about two, though.”

“Why’s that?” Harry asked.

“She fell ill,” Ginny answered matter-of-factly. “At first the _Prophet_ reported that it was a mild chest infection, not unlike what Muggles get all the time. But eventually it got worse. She publically announced her retirement from Quidditch about six months after she’d stopped playing, and she died about six months after that. The Healers said it was a miracle that she’d lasted that long. Pansy was three.”

“That’s horrible,” Harry said. “What a terrible thing to happen to somebody when they’re just a little girl.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Ginny nodded solemnly. “So Pansy was raised by her father, but her father … wasn’t the nicest of people.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was negligent,” Ginny explained. “From what I’ve heard he spent most of his time either at his office at work or his office at home. Pansy rarely saw him, and if she did all she got from him was harsh words. She probably turned to the House-elf for love and all of that other stuff kids need when they’re growing up. She certainly wasn’t going to get it from her dad. Can you imagine? Spending something like eight years of your life in a huge house all by yourself like that?”

“No. Of course I can’t.” Harry looked down at the wood pattern on Ginny’s kitchen table. He was trying to take it all in. Pansy’s wasn’t necessarily the most horrible of childhoods. His life as an Auror had revealed to him some truly horrific stories. Hell, his own childhood had hardly been fun. But Pansy’s childhood sounded very lonely. Dead mother, ignorant father, and nothing but a House-elf for company. Maybe that was why Pansy seemed so vulnerable. In retrospect, if Harry had spent his childhood utterly deprived of any human contact, he would probably be pretty vulnerable as well.

“How do you know all of this?” Harry asked, looking back up at Ginny after a while.

Ginny shrugged in response. “Her mother played for the Harpies, and we’re supposed to know about famous past players. And don’t forget that she’s pretty well-known in the Quidditch circles herself. She probably told a little to one person, a little to another, and eventually the whole story came together and was circulated around. I think you’ll find that most people who play professional Quidditch in Britain know about Pansy Parkinson’s past.”

“I hope it’s all right for me to know about it,” Harry said.

“I’m sure it’s fine. You said that the two of you are friends now, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well then it’s definitely fine. Because believe me when I tell you that Pansy Parkinson does not allow many people to become her friend.”

Harry didn’t bother to hold back a chuckle at that. “Yeah, I got that impression. She’s very proper, isn’t she?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Hey Gin?” Harry asked, a final thought suddenly occurring to him.

“Mmm?”

“Pansy’s mum,” he said, trying to remember if Ginny had mentioned it before. “What was her name?”

“Her name?” Ginny jumped out of her chair and left the room, leaving Harry to scratch his head in confusion. After less than a minute Ginny returned and handed him something. It was a chocolate frog card. The picture on it showed a young, smiling woman with light blonde hair cascading down her shoulder in soft waves. Her skin was pale, but her cheeks were flushed with a healthy peach tone. Her nose was small and slightly pointed. In fact, if it weren’t for this woman’s eyes, Harry wouldn’t have thought that this was Pansy’s mother at all. But even with this relatively small chocolate frog card picture, Harry could see the resemblance in the eyes straight away. They were Pansy’s eyes.

“Rose,” came Ginny’s voice. Harry looked up at her.

“Sorry?”

“Rose,” Ginny repeated, pointing at the card. “Her mother’s name was Rose.”

~*~YOU MAY CUT HERE~*~

Pansy hummed to herself as the stepped daintily from one part of her office to another, aiming well-practiced _Scourgify_ s wherever dust had gathered. She was feeling pretty good today. She’d had a good night’s sleep, she’d made her deadlines, and Minerva had just approved her final schedule for the tournament.

It also didn’t hurt that today was Monday, and she would therefore be seeing Harry Potter again.

It was strange, how much she looked forward to his visits. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when she’d begun to eagerly anticipate them, but it was probably sometime around last week. She wasn’t entirely sure of the reason for her eager anticipation. It was possibly because he understood her dry sense of humour and wasn’t at all offended by it. Or that he seemed completely at ease while with her, despite her uptight manner.

But Pansy suspected that it was because Harry had become her friend, and she was experiencing friendship for the first time in a while.

Pansy had had friends before, certainly. She hadn’t had any before going to Hogwarts, besides Buffy, but she had been a mother as much as she’d been a friend. Her Hogwarts friends were different. They didn’t need to take care of her, and they never offered. They were her friends because they wanted to be. At the time, Pansy was considered cool, and popular.

Towards the end of her time at Hogwarts most of her friends drifted away, either because their parents removed them from the school, or because they were becoming more and more heavily engrossed in Voldemort’s cause, and Pansy was not, despite what she might have claimed at the time, necessarily comfortable with that. After the war was over she remained friends with Draco, but that was due more to family ties than anything else. She knew that everybody had expected them to marry until Draco brought Astoria Greengrass home. Pansy was glad, truth be told. She adored Draco, but the thought of being his wife made her feel uncomfortable. The demographic between them somehow wasn’t right. They were both Pureblood, but Draco had been raised in a cushioned world of wealth, privilege and love. He couldn’t begin to fathom Pansy’s world, and Pansy had always felt that he didn’t want to.

And then there was that other close friendship she’d had; one that had ended so suddenly and, considering what must have happened afterwards, for no reason at all. Out of all of the friendships Pansy had had, that was the one she missed the most.

Just as Pansy applied one last _Scourgify_ on her beloved rose painting, she heard someone knock on her door. _Is that him?_ she wondered. Looking at her clock she saw that it was only 5:30. He wasn’t due for another half an hour.

She placed her wand on her desk and patted her hair down as she approached the door. When she opened she saw that Harry was indeed early. This pleased her.

“You’re—“

“I know. I thought I’d surprise you,” Harry cut her off. He grinned his trademark impish grin at her. Pansy shook her head and moved aside to let him enter.

“Tell me,” he said, removing his jacket and placing it over his usual chair, “what happens when I arrive exactly on time? Do I get a prize?”

“You might get my approval,” Pansy offered.

“Wow. Really? That most unattainable of prizes could be mine, if I managed to arrive here at the dot of six?”

“Indeed it could. But you’d have to be very precise.” A thought occurred to Pansy then. She really was particular about punctuality. She always had been. But then, her father had always insisted when she was a child that she was on time, for dinner or some other such thing. Maybe that was where she got it from?

“So I got your letter about you sending the draft to McGonagall,” Harry said. Pansy shook herself back to attention. “Sorry I didn’t reply. I was called out to deal with some suspicious activity over in Manchester-way.”

“Oh right, Manchester,” Pansy nodded. “Apparently there’s a largish Dark Arts following there.”

“We’re pretty sure there is. Merlin knows we get called over there often enough.”

“Mmm. Anyway, it’s no problem. I just thought I should let you know. Now,” Pansy made her way to her normal seat, “I think we need to think about owling people to help out during the day.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. “Running around, finding people, finding balls, and all of that?”

“Exactly,” Pansy affirmed. “You’ll be pretty busy with all of your games, so I’m hardly going to get you to do it. I could get the Hogwarts staff to help out, but I don’t really like that idea. I’d rather they sit back and enjoy themselves.”

“Absolutely,” Harry agreed. “What about some of the other students who were around during the war? The ones who didn’t play Quidditch? Maybe they’d like to do their part to help out?”

“Oh, now there’s an idea.” Pansy considered it for a moment, then shook her head. “I really am an idiot sometimes. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“You’re not an idiot, Pansy,” Harry said.

Pansy opened her mouth to say something in reply, but faltered at the look on Harry’s face. He was watching her, his eyes unusually wide and serious. She found it impossible to turn her face away from him.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to. He snapped out of whatever bizarre trance he seemed to have been in pretty quickly. “ _Ahem_. Well I know that Ron and Hermione would like to assist in any way they can. Ron was pretty annoyed about not being able to play.”

“I’m sure he was. But even he’d agree that compared to Oliver Wood, his Keeping skills weren’t much.”

“Ron was a brilliant Keeper,” Harry loyally disagreed.

“How lucky he is to have a friend like you,” Pansy observed. “In any case, having them around would probably be good for bringing in more people. They were your right and left wings after all.”

“Well yeah, but I don’t think we need to be worried about attracting crowds at this stage. You’ve seen the ticket sales. Right now the danger is more that we won’t have enough room for everybody.”

It was true. Tickets for the tournament had gone on sale a week and a half ago, and to date nearly 30,000 had been sold to witches and wizards all over Britain, and in some cases other parts of Europe. That number was expected to increase pretty dramatically in the less-than-three-weeks left before the big day. It was great to see that so many people were coming, but Pansy was inevitably starting to worry about the chances of something going wrong.

“Relax,” Harry said.

Pansy shook herself again. She seemed to be going into her own mind a lot these days. “What?”

“You’re worrying again. Stop it. The tournament isn’t for three weeks and we’re preparing really well for it. There isn’t going to be a problem.”

“I … you …” Pansy cleared her throat and tried again. “You told me a few weeks ago that you would try not to creep me out by, what did you call it? ‘Reading’ me?”

“Sorry,” he apologised. “I didn’t realise that it creped you out.”

“It doesn’t, per se,” Pansy corrected herself, “but it is unsettling. Most people have no idea what I’m thinking about. But you seem to get it every time.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Harry said. “There have been times, in our few exchanges, that I haven’t had a clue what you’re thinking.”

“Really? Well, perhaps we should try to keep it that way.” Pansy turned back to her notes. “All right, so say we get your friends to help out. I think we should write out the jobs that we need people to do during the day, and then send out invites to people who we think would be suited for the job and ask them to reply as soon as they can. We probably should have organised this earlier, hey?”

Harry didn’t respond. Pansy glanced over at him and saw that he was staring at her again. Not in the same serious way as he had before. No. This time he appeared more contemplative. Like she was a puzzle that he didn’t quite know how to solve.

“Um,” she said, not sure about the best way to get his attention. “Um, Harry? Are you listening to me?”

“You know,” he said, giving no indication that he’d heard her question, let alone was preparing to answer it. “We’re kind of similar; you and me.”

Pansy wasn’t sure how to respond to that. It wasn’t as if what Harry had said was a compliment, unless he was unusually big-headed, but Pansy didn’t think he was. It was more that she couldn’t have disagreed with him more.

“I don’t follow,” she said. “We both have black hair and green eyes, but apart from that—“

“I didn’t mean aesthetically. Although you’re right, come to think of it. I meant that we have pretty similar pasts.” Harry paused to take off his glasses and start to polish them. “We both didn’t really have parents. I mean, they were either dead or neglectful. And we didn’t have many friends, for whatever reason. That’s a bit different to what most people get, isn’t it?”

“Well yes, it is, but … how did you find out about my past?” People very rarely talked to Pansy about her past. For one thing it was awkward, having a history that people knew about before actually meeting her. And it wasn’t as if it was a pleasant history either. Pansy could still remember her mother, to an extent that was eerie considering how young Pansy had been when she died. But Pansy had adored her, in every sense of the word. She had been Pansy’s whole world, and the rest of the Wizarding world had seemingly known it. But Harry Potter had just as famously been raised by Muggles, and Muggles wouldn’t have given a toss about who Rose Parkinson was. So how did he know about her mother? Had he been doing research behind her back or something?

“Er, Ginny told me,” Harry answered. “She said that it would be all right for me to know, because you and I are friends and everything.”

“Ginny…” Pansy murmured, nodding in understanding. “Now it makes sense. Did she just tell you about my mother, or did she mention my dad too?”

“She told me about your dad, yeah,” Harry replied. “She told me that everybody knows about your relationship with him. Everybody in the Quidditch circles, anyway—“

“Oh, Merlin no,” Pansy said, shaking her head. “Barely anybody knows about my father. He wasn’t the famous one. Nobody really wants to know about him. Or me.”

“I want to know about you,” Harry disagreed.

“I—“ Pansy faltered. Harry had put on that serious expression again. Pansy didn’t understand it. Was he trying to achieve something with his bizarrely intimate words and serious faces? Or did they just come to him naturally? 

“So then,” Harry said, after a moment’s tense silence, “why did Ginny know about your father?”

“Well, that’s a bit of a long story,” Pansy said. “But, essentially, we used to be friends.”

“Really?” Harry hadn’t been so surprised since, well, a few weeks ago when Pansy had asked him to work with her. But before then, he hadn’t been so surprised since he heard Ron’s wedding vows for the first time and discovered that under all that idiocy was someone who cared for Hermione, in particular, to such an extent that it sounded almost painful. This was about as surprising as that, though. Pansy and Ginny were sworn enemies at Hogwarts. And even if they hadn’t been, the two of them were as different as chalk and cheese. Ginny was a messy, disordered, accident-prone, relentlessly cheerful individual. Pansy was tidy, fashionable, graceful and vulnerable. Harry couldn’t see how a friendship between them could have existed.

“Mm-hm. Really good friends, actually,” Pansy nodded. “We started needing to talk to each other the summer after Hogwarts, when she was training with the Harpies’ reserve squad and I’d become an intern with the _Prophet_. We weren’t happy with it at first, but eventually, yeah, we grew on each other. We were friends for about three years.”

“That’s incredible,” Harry said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m amazed she didn’t tell me. That was when we were going out.”

Pansy snorted. “Well, think about what you were like back then. Would you have honestly let her be friends with someone like me?”

Harry opened his mouth to say that yes, of course he would, if it made Ginny happy. But the look Pansy gave him was transparent. She knew the truth as well as he did. There wasn’t much point in denying it. After all, they were past all of that prejudice now.

“Fair point,” he, therefore, eventually admitted. Pansy smiled knowingly.

~*~

_Harry,_

_OK, here’s the final list of jobs. As I said on Monday, I’m pretty sure we haven’t left anything out, but feel free to have another think about it and let me know. I thought about the people who might want to do them as well, but unfortunately I’ve only since been able to contact the Slytherins, of whom there aren’t many. To be honest, none of them seemed very keen on the idea. It’s not what I know you think though. I will be the first to admit that one of the unfortunate traits of my old House is that we were extremely lazy. Perhaps we’ll have more success with the others, but I’m afraid you will have to contact them. I don’t think they would take kindly to a letter from me._

_In other news, Montague sent me an Owl about the condition of the Hogwarts pitch. He’s apparently not happy with it. The goal posts are too highly polished, and if the day proves to be really sunny, the shine from the posts might blind them. Also, he thinks the grass looks a bit long. How do you think we should reply to him? You’re much better at writing tactful letters than I am._

_Regards, Pansy._

_Pansy,_

_Thanks for the list. I think it’s all good, but do we need so many people running up to give the players drinks? The games do only last for an hour at most, after all. Surely just 2 or 3 people doing that job would be enough? And I’ll contact the people whose names you’ve written down within the next few days. You’re being pretty efficient for someone who hasn’t organised anything bigger than her office before, I must say. Though, you organise your office very well._

_Why don’t you just tell Montague to bugger off and have done with it? Quidditch is a_ flying _game, for Merlin’s sake! The condition of the grass matters about as much as manners clearly matter to him. If you like, I’ll mention it to Hagrid, but honestly, you’d think we were playing cricket or something._

_Harry._

_Harry,_

_We can reduce the number of, what do American Muggles call them? Waterboys? We can reduce the number of them if need be, but if enough people want to help it seems like a good job to get them to do. Have you owled all of the people yet? I won’t stop reminding you until you do. I’d be sorry, but, well, I don’t want to be._

_I’ve told Montague I’ll handle it, and he sent me a reply saying that I’d better, or he’s out. Here I was thinking that this was going to be a nice, friendly tournament. Well, no, to be honest, I was pretty sure some people were going to make it nasty (and DO NOT say that only Slytherins are the culprits here)._

_What’s cricket? I thought it was a type of insect. It doesn’t have any magic in it though. But what does that have to do with this?_

_Regards,_

_Pansy._

_Pansy,_

_I’ve owled them. If you don’t stop nagging me I’ll officially declare our relationship over._

_I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough people for all of those jobs. A few people said no, because they’ve already got tickets and would rather watch, which I suppose is fair._

_Hagrid told me that he’s planning on shortening the grass before the tournament, so it will look pointlessly pretty for Montague. And believe me, if you could see how Wood is manhandling us during practice, you would understand that me accusing Slytherins of being the only competitive House would be about the most inaccurate thing I could say. Ever._

_Crickets are insects, yes, but I was referring to a Muggle sport that’s played on the ground and requires really short, well-kept grass. It was just an example._

_That’s all from me. Over and out._

_Harry._

~*~

Harry stood outside the door for two minutes, checking his watch, before knocking.

The door opened instantly. 

“Hi,” Pansy greeted him, smiling. “You’re on time.”

“Yes, I am. You answered the door pretty quickly. You weren’t standing right behind it, were you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pansy answered, but Harry noticed that she turned away from him equally quickly. He couldn’t help but smile. If their roles had been reversed, he would probably have been waiting behind the door for her as well. He had spent enough of his time during the past week staring at his door, waiting for an owl to come in with a letter from her. Something about her thrilled him, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. 

“Something smells good,” she commented, sitting down at her desk and sliding a cup of coffee in his direction.

Harry held up a plastic bag. “Chinese food. I thought you might be hungry. We don’t have much to discuss this week, so I figured we could get it out of the way, then have some dinner. I’ve put a charm on it to keep it from getting cold.”

“Clever.”

“Rare for me, I know.” Harry placed the bag on the desk, opened his briefcase and pulled out a roll of parchment. “All right, so here’s the full list, of absolutely everybody who has any involvement in this tournament at all. I took the liberty of putting our names at the top.”

“I see you put my name first. That’s generous of you,” Pansy remarked.

“Well, don’t go thinking it’s because I like you or respect you or anything. I just thought alphabetical order was probably the safest route.”

“Relax. I know you respect me naught. That’s why you brought me dinner and have been dragging your sorry arse over here every Monday. It’s to torture me.”

“Absolutely.” Harry smiled at her, and she grinned back.

“All right, moving on from this hurtful banter,” Harry continued, indicating the scroll in Pansy’s hand, “the only thing I think we need to discuss is umpires.”

“Umpires? Why? I thought you liked Madam Hooch?”

“I do. But I think it would be good if there were two umpires. Just so she can have breaks, you know? Umpiring can be pretty tiring.”

“That’s a good point.” Pansy frowned at the parchment. “Maybe we could get one of the professional umpires to help out? They might be willing to donate their time?”

“We could,” Harry replied, “but I have a better idea. I think you should do it.”

“Me?” Pansy regarded him with confusion. “That makes no sense. I’ve never umpired before. I wouldn’t know the first thing about umpiring.”

“Umpiring is nothing but pointing out the rules of Quidditch over and over again to fourteen gits on broomsticks. And I think that even someone as hopeless at receiving compliments as you can admit that if there’s one thing you know, it’s the rules of Quidditch.”

“I … well … yes, I do know Quidditch,” Pansy nodded. She bit her lip and looked up at him. “Do you really think I can do it?”

There seemed to lie the fundamental difference between Pansy and the other women he knew. The likes of Ginny or Hermione would never look at him and ask him if he thought they were capable of something. It wasn’t a case of them not valuing his opinion or anything like that. They were just confident women. They always knew whether or not they could do something, and they didn’t need anybody else to tell them otherwise. But Pansy … she was never sure. He wouldn’t mind betting that it had taken Minerva McGonagall a long time to convince her that she was capable of organising this tournament, and yet she’d done it. With his help, but still, she’d done it. It was such a foreign concept, for him, to be confronted by a brilliant person who didn’t understand how brilliant they were.

“Would I be suggesting that you do this if I thought that you couldn’t do it?” he asked her, in the end.

“You might be,” Pansy answered, “if you were trying to torture me.”

“I thought we’d already established that I show up here every week to torture you,” Harry said, reaching for the bag of food. “And honestly, I think that alone is enough. There’s only so much torture one human being can bear.”

“That’s true. I’ll think about it.” She watched him lifting plastic containers out of the bag with fascination. “I’ve never had this kind of food before,” she said.

“I figured. You people raised in Wizard homes are missing out, believe me.” He passed her a small plastic bowl and a pair of chopsticks. Then, taking a large serving spoon and the container of rice, he plonked a dollop of it into her bowl.

“Chicken or beef?” he asked.

“I like chicken,” Pansy said uncertainly, and Harry nodded, opened up a container containing some kind of meat-and-vegetable concoction swimming in a brown sauce, and spooned some of that into each of their bowls.

“Now you dig in,” he said. “Unless you’re not great with handling chopsticks.”

“I think I ate enough gourmet sushi as a child to manage,” Pansy retorted. She picked up the chopsticks, arranged them to sit daintily in her hands, and gathered some of the mixture between them. She took a bite and chewed. She had to admit, she was impressed. The combination of flavours was amazing in a way that she had not experienced before. This was exciting food – the sort of food that people ate when they felt like treating themselves.

“I knew you’d like it,” Harry said.

“How did you know that I was thinking about … forget it.” Pansy shook her head. She’d get used to him eventually. Although, they were only going to meet each other twice more before this would all be over.

Pansy stopped eating in alarm. She hadn’t thought of that. She looked over at Harry and saw that he was looking back at her, chopsticks suspended in midair.

“Do you realise—“ Pansy began

“—that we’ve only got two weeks left? Yes,” Harry interrupted her.

Pansy placed her bowl on the table, laying the chopsticks over them so as not to get her desk dirty. “That was a quick few months.”

“It really was, wasn’t it?” Harry placed his bowl on the desk as well. “I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

“Well,” Harry cleared his throat. “Maybe after this is done, I could sort of, you know, continue to come here, every week.”

“Really?” Pansy frowned in confusion. “But we’d have no work to do. We’d have nothing to talk about.”

“’Nothing to talk about’?” Harry repeated. “Are you serious? We’ll have tonnes of things to talk about. We’re not working now, are we? Yet we’re talking. We’ve never not had something to talk about before. Why would we start to have trouble now?”

“I … don’t know?” Pansy answered, shrugging feebly. “I don’t really see why you’d want to come here every week, if it’s not necessary.”

“Pansy, come on.” Harry did something he hadn’t done before, and reached across to take her hand. Pansy stared, wide-eyed, at their connecting hands. Not only were their hands touching, but the strange tingling sensation she had felt every time they had touched before had returned. What was that? She had no idea. But feeling Harry’s hand on hers was thrilling, in a way that she couldn’t articulate.

“Joking aside,” Harry said, “we’re friends, Pansy. I’m your friend, and you’re my friend. Friends, by and large, want to spend time together. Don’t you want to spend time with me?”

“Of course I do,” Pansy answered, finding the question unnecessary. She would have thought it obvious that that was what she wanted. “But why would you want to—“

“Stop, Pansy. Just stop.” Harry gripped her hand tighter. “I know you won’t understand this, but just know that I really like spending time with you. I think you’re funny, and interesting, and a lot of other good stuff. And I want to get to know you better. What do you say?”

What did she say? First of all, he had just given her so many compliments that she was momentarily tongue-tied. Secondly, well, the very concept was unbelievable. Nobody spent more time with her than was absolutely necessary. She wasn’t Saint Harry Potter and His Band of Merry Men. She wasn’t popular, or nice. She wasn’t even that famous. She just wrote Quidditch. She was nobody.

But the thought of spending more time with Harry was, well, exciting beyond belief. She would have a friend. An actual, proper friend. One who spent time with her not just because he had to. She hadn’t had that sort of friend in seven years. Not since Ginny. Was it possible that she had found that sort of friend again, in Harry Potter of all people?

Well, whether it was or wasn’t, this was much too good an opportunity for her to throw away. And so she said “I’d really like that.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Harry let go of her hand and, as though they’d merely been discussing the weather before now, went back to his dinner. Pansy looked down at hers, still giving off clouds of fragrant steam, and bit her lip again.

“Something wrong?” Harry asked.

She looked up and shook her head. “No. Nothing. But, I wanted to, well, um. Well, the thing is, er, you, um…”

“Take a deep breath,” Harry advised. “I find that helps on the rare occasions that I can’t think of what to say.”

Pansy raised an eyebrow in doubt, but did as he said. She inhaled, breathing in a hefty amount of hot rice-and-chicken smell, and then exhaled it all out again. And amazingly, she felt calmer. _Wow_ , she thought. _Maybe I should try that the next time I have to interview a Cannons team member and have been ordered not to tell them how much they suck_.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said.

It was Harry’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “What for?”

“For helping me. With this tournament.” Pansy ran a long fingernail through her hair. “You have really helped me a lot. I don’t know how I would have done this without you.”

Harry smiled. “It’s been a pleasure,” he said. “Really, it has. But I wouldn’t relax just yet. We still have almost two weeks before the tournament. Anything can happen before then. You could be asked to speak, on pain of death, right after somebody has told you that you look exceptionally beautiful that day.”

Pansy was surprised, for a moment. But she was Pansy Parkinson, after all. And this wasn’t, despite what it looked like, a compliment. She quickly recovered. “True. Or you could open your front door only to be knocked over by clusters of adoring Potter-ites who have somehow managed to figure out where you live.”

“Or you could wake up one morning and discover that somebody has stolen your rose painting.”

“Or you could wake up and find your broomstick missing…”

~*~

_Harry,_

_All right. I’ve decided. I’m putting my foot down, as hard as I can on paper, where no actual foot exists. I’m going to be the second umpire. It might be a spectacular failure. I might forget how to blow the whistle, or really basic rules like that hitting another team member with anything that isn’t a Bludger is a foul. But I’m going to do it._

_Incidentally, I hate you for suggesting that I should do it. I cannot believe that you would do this to me. And I thought we had something magical._

_I’ll see you on Monday,_

_Pansy._

Harry smiled to himself as he read her letter. He was pleased with this development. For somebody who normally knew exactly what they were doing, flinging oneself into something one hadn’t done before was a drastic move. But she had Quidditch on her side, so he was sure she would be fine.

“What’s that?” Harry looked up to see Ginny coming in, a mug of tea in each hand.

“Letter from Pansy,” Harry answered, taking his mug from her. He took a sip and had to resist a shudder. His frequent coffees in Pansy’s office made him realise that it was his drink of choice. It didn’t help that Ginny made the tea far too strong, and didn’t add enough milk. That was the other thing too – Pansy always added just the right amount of Firewhiskey to his drink.

_Wait_ , he thought to himself. _Why am I comparing Pansy to Ginny here?_

“Ahh, right,” Ginny said, nodding slowly. “What does the letter say?”

“Just that she’s agreed to be the second umpire for the tournament. I suggested to her on Monday that she should do it. She seemed worried about it, but luckily she’s come around.” Harry smiled down at the letter. “She’s going to be great.”

Ginny cocked her head to one side. Something about how Harry was acting gave her pause. She had seen him act this way before, but it had been a while ago, and only towards certain specific people. _Could it be?_ Ginny wondered. _Could Harry, with Pansy, be—_

“We were talking about you a bit on Monday,” Harry said, interrupting Ginny’s train of thought.

“Were you?”

“Yeah.” Harry took another mouthful of tea. “She told me that the two of you used to be friends.”

Ginny froze, her mug halfway to her lips. Harry frowned, squinting at her as though worried that she might be ill. “Gin? Ginny?” He clicked his fingers in front of her face, and she managed to shake herself back to consciousness.

“Sorry Harry. I just … phew … it’s been a while since I thought about that.” She completed her mug’s journey to her mouth and took a hearty gulp of refreshing brew, then brought her mug back down to find Harry still eyeing her quizzically. 

“What?” she asked.

“What happened between you two?” Harry’s eyes were challenging hers. Ginny felt like she was being trialled by the Wizengamot. “Something must have happened. Pansy was saying that you two were once really good friends, but now you’re not. And you, you lied to me about everybody knowing about her past. You were trying to hide that she was your friend. Why? What happened?”

Ginny did nothing for a moment, while Harry wondered if he had somehow gone too far. Ginny then drew in a shaky breath and said, not looking directly at him, “I don’t think I should tell you, Harry. It’s not a great story, and it’s not … I don’t think you will like it.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Harry asked. “Does this have something to do with me?”

“It has … everything to do with you,” Ginny said.

Well, that was it. Harry simply had to know now. “You know as well as anybody that you can’t tell me that something involves me, and not expect me to want to know everything,” he said.

“I know,” Ginny said, rubbing her temple with the tips of her fingers, which Harry randomly noticed were the exact opposite of Pansy’s – short, unpolished, and dirty. Harry preferred them that way, truth be told. “Maybe I wanted to tell you.”

“Well then,” Harry said, waving his hand in her direction, “go ahead.”

“Fine,” Ginny agreed. “But before I do, please, _please_ try not to get too upset.”

“Why would I get upset?”

Ginny chose to ignore his question. “Pansy and I were friends. Best friends, I think. We told each other everything, and since we ran with different circles we agreed to keep the friendship a secret. That’s why I never told you about it.”

“I’m so thrilled that I wasn’t an exception to the rule,” Harry said.

If Ginny had heard the sarcasm, she again chose to ignore it. “One evening, about seven years ago, we were at her place having a few drinks. We started talking about love and relationships, and you came up. She asked me how I was finding the relationship, and I said … well … I said that you were great, you know? Really loving, really supportive of me, really caring. All of the stuff that a person should want in a relationship. She then said to me ‘You’re bored, aren’t you?’”

The lines on Harry’s forehead deepened with the increased intensity of his frown. “And what did you say?”

Ginny bit her lip, looked up and said “We were being truthful to each other, Harry. I said ‘yes’.”

Harry took a deep breath. He couldn’t lie – that was an ego bruiser if ever he’d heard one. But he was a professional – if he got pissy at her, she would not tell the rest of the story. One more deep breath later, he waved his hand in her direction again. “Go on.”

“Well,” Ginny continued, “Pansy didn’t seem surprised at my saying that. She said ‘well, you can’t have that! You are a young, beautiful, feisty young woman. You need excitement in your life, and Potter clearly isn’t giving that to you. You should make a change for yourself, and you need somebody who can give you the kind of love you want. You should break up with him’.”

Harry could, quite literally, feel his heart stop. “She said that?” he whispered.

Ginny nodded. “She did. I was so furious with her for suggesting it that I stood up and walked out, telling her that our friendship was officially over. But I thought about what she said for a long time afterwards, and eventually I realised that she was right. And so, I broke up with you.”

“You broke up with me?” Harry repeated. “No, you didn’t. We broke up with each other. It was mutual.”

“Was it?” Ginny asked. “Don’t you remember what happened that day? How you reacted?”

Harry cast his mind back. He had tried replaying the scene in his head many times during the past seven years, but had always come out blank. It was as if his mind had clouded out the memory so he wouldn’t be able to see it. But now the cloud was disappearing, and what he hadn’t known for ages was becoming clear.

He was sitting in his living room. _Their_ living room, as it had been back then. Ginny was standing in front of him, a packed suitcase at her feet. She was crying, but her face was determined. She was not going to change her mind. She picked up the suitcase, cast one final look at him, and then walked out the door. He didn’t try to stop her.

He was at work, telling Shacklebolt that he would be taking a leave of absence for an indeterminate amount of time. Shacklebolt asked him if he was all right. Harry lied, said that he was perfectly fine, and exited the Minister’s office without another word.

He was in his hallway, hurling delicate porcelain objects at his front door. On the other side of it Ron and Hermione were trying to get inside to talk to him. He yelled, as loudly as he could, that he didn’t give a shit about what they had to say unless it was that Ginny had been killed, painfully, by the most gruesome of magical creatures.

He was lying on his living room floor, in a foetal position, while Hermione ran her wand over his scratched, bloody fists; the result of him viciously punching the side of the brick fireplace in a moment of total stupidity. He felt the soothing, motherly touch of Hermione’s fingers on his arm and started to shakily whisper “I’ve lost her, Hermione. I’ve lost her.”

He was in his bedroom, a bottle of Firewhiskey in his hand, sitting on his bed and swigging occasionally, his face wet with tears.

He was sitting in his living room, again. He could smell her. _She_ was here. He could hear voices down the hall – Hermione wondering if they should put a Memory Charm on him, and _she_ saying that he needed to work this out himself. Then the smell was gone.

Finally, he was in his dining room, eating his dinner. A knock came at the door, and Harry opened it to see Ginny standing there, looking more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She told him that she needed him, that she’d never stop loving him, and that he would never lose her. Things would just be a bit different now. She wrapped her arms around him, and he, not sure of what else to do, hugged her back.

Harry came back to reality to find the same person sitting across the table, looking at him anxiously. 

“Please say something,” she begged him quietly.

Harry shook his head. He wasn’t sure what to think. “Why didn’t I remember any of that stuff, if you didn’t put a Memory Charm on me?”

Ginny shrugged. “Hermione thinks that the mind has an amazing ability to defend itself against painful memories.”

“Hmm.” He took a sip of now-cold tea, and this time couldn’t help but pull a face. “I can’t believe I acted so ridiculously. Punching the side of a fireplace? What was I thinking?”

“Nobody’s judging you Harry. Certainly not me,” Ginny assured him. “You were grieving. Believe me, I was too. I was so sure that I was going to lose you forever; that you were never going to forgive me. I couldn’t have bared it if that had happened.”

“I wouldn’t have done very well either,” Harry responded, “evidently.”

“Exactly,” Ginny nodded. “That was why I came to your house that evening. But I think that, overall, it was a good thing. I don’t think that you and I were right for each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re too much like friends. And I wouldn’t have figured that out, if it hadn’t been for Pansy.”

_Pansy_. Harry had completely forgotten her involvement in this. Up until a few moments ago he had agreed with Ginny. He had thought that their break-up was by-and-large a good thing. And maybe it was, for her. But now that he thought about it, it hadn’t been a remotely good thing for him. He had spent that seven years in aimless wonder, listlessly doing a job that he was very good at, becoming a shrewd investigator, capturing bad guys and throwing them in prison, all with the knowledge that he was going home to a world with no excitement and no future possibilities. He had been in a rut. He knew it now. With Ginny those possibilities had surely been there. If they had stayed together they would have got married, had children, and grown old together in the pleasantness of each other’s company. That was exciting enough for him and it would have been exciting enough for Ginny. But no. Pansy had come along, and without his knowing it she had completely ruined the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was all her fault.

“I loved you,” Harry said quietly to Ginny.

Ginny shook her head slowly. “No, you didn’t. You loved me as a close friend, and you still do, but not as a lover. There’s a difference.”

“Not to me there isn’t.” Harry could feel his blood start to boil, but he was bigger than this now. He could control his anger. He took yet another deep breath to try and settle himself. “Love is love,” he eventually managed to say, in a voice that he was pleased to hear was calm. “That is all there is. How can there be more than one type of love?”

“There is, Harry. Trust me.” Ginny took his mug and placed them both on the counter. “Do you need to trust me on this one, even? Don’t you feel a difference between the love you feel for me, Ron and Hermione, and the love you feel for somebody else? Somebody like, say—“

“No,” Harry disagreed, not having really listened to her. “Sorry Gin, but I think you’ve got it wrong. The way it looks to me is that you broke up with me, I spent seven years believing some strange lie I’d managed to concoct for myself, and now that I know the truth it seems clear to me that nothing needed to change. But thanks to her it did.”

“But Harry, things _did_ need to change,” Ginny disagreed, now regarding him with a look that seemed almost desperate. “If things hadn’t changed I wouldn’t have Blaise, and you wouldn’t be starting to—“

“I don’t want to hear it Gin,” Harry interrupted, waving her off. “I think I need to go now.”

“All right, fine. But Harry, please, don’t do anything stupid--!”

Harry was out of the door before Ginny could say anything else.

~*~

Pansy had spent the last two hours trying to proof-read a piece one of her interns had written on dodgy Quaffle manufacturers. She had gotten nowhere, of course. She couldn’t help it. She was so distracted. The only thing that she could think about was Harry. Every letter that came from him, every conversation they had had, every smile he had shot her way, every time he had touched her – she could remember it all, and every memory made her shiver with joy. She had never been so distracted before. Even Quidditch-related issues were failing to interest her. Every few minutes since around midday she had been glancing at the clock, willing for 6 o’clock to hurry up and come, hoping that he would surprise her by being early. It was five to six now, and she was restless with anticipation. It was no wonder, really, that she was having such trouble proof-reading.

When the knock came she literally jumped out of her seat and ran to the door. She flung it open and, not taking a spare second to look at him, began chatting away.

“Hi, hi. You’re getting better at the punctuality thing, aren’t you? Anyway, we don’t have much to talk about this evening, really. Just a few owls to organise, which I’ll send off tomorrow morning. Everything else is ready to go, so I thought I’d buy you dinner afterwards since you did the same for me last week. There’s a good Italian place down the road that I thought you’d like, and we can just chat like we normally do. I thought that would be fun. Does that sound all right to you?”

Harry didn’t respond. It took Pansy a while to realise that he was being unusually silent. When she did realise it, and turn around, she saw that he was still standing at the door. Confused, Pansy walked back over and gave him a critical once-over.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” Harry answered.

“Oh.” Pansy frowned. She was not very good at offering useful advice, having not had much practice at it. But Harry was her friend, so she would try. “You could tell me what the trouble is?” she offered. “Maybe I can help.”

“Yes, perhaps you can,” Harry agreed, but it didn’t sound very much like he was agreeing with her. He sounded unsettlingly bitter; a sarcastic kind of bitterness. She wasn’t used to Harry talking like this. The sarcasm she had heard many times, but he had never been bitter.

He stormed (there was no other word for it) into the office and flopped into his normal chair. Pansy settled delicately into hers and placed her clasped hands on her desk.

“I was talking to Ginny the other day,” Harry began.

Pansy was immediately confused. Didn’t Harry and Ginny see each other several times a week? Why would his talking to her be remotely newsworthy? “Oh yes?”

“Yes. She told me about this one time when you two were talking about me. You asked her how the relationship was going, she said it was going well, and then you, for _some_ reason, deduced that she was bored. With me.”

Pansy thought back for a moment, then nodded. “That sounds about right.” She couldn’t really understand Ginny’s reasoning now, considering how interesting and exciting she, Pansy, thought Harry was. She supposed that their being friends for so long created a different demographic. At any rate, it had been perfectly clear to Pansy how bored Ginny seemed to be. Pansy knew enough about Ginny at the time to know that she was the self-contradictory type, and that she was therefore prone to complain about the things she was enjoying. Pansy heard her complain about Quidditch so many times in the years that they were friends, and she had complained about Harry often enough in the early days of their friendship. So if Ginny was showering Harry with compliments now, when he wasn’t even there, it seemed obvious enough that Ginny was not entirely satisfied with how things were going. Surely Harry, the master of ‘reading’ people, could understand that?

“Ginny then told me,” Harry continued, and Pansy started to see his face darken, “that you told her that since she was bored, that she should break up with me, and find somebody more exciting. Is that right?”

Pansy nodded, still confused over Harry’s anger. “That’s correct. She was furious at me. It was the end of our friendship, and I was trying to help her, so I was pretty hurt. But I guess things turned out well for her in the end.”

“She took your advice,” Harry continued. “She broke up with me soon after that.”

“She … really? But you told me you broke up with each other?”

“I thought we did,” Harry said, his face darkening further, “but it turns out I was wrong. She broke up with me.”

“Wow,” Pansy said, nodding thoughtfully. “So she took my advice. How surprising. I’m glad she took it though. It was good advice.”

“Not for me it wasn’t!” Harry suddenly roared, banging his fist on the desk. Pansy jumped out of her chair again, but this time not from excitement. No, she was frightened now. 

“What are you talking about?” she asked, unable to stop her voice from shaking a little. “You two weren’t happy together. Didn’t you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that. Because I was perfectly happy!” Harry flung himself out of his chair and started pacing the spacious office floor. “She was everything to me! She was my best friend, my confidante, my world! And thanks to you – you and your _stupid_ advice, I lost her! I lost everything when she broke up with me and I’ve never gotten it back!” 

Harry stopped pacing right in front of Pansy’s rose painting. Barely thinking about what he was doing, he reached up and started tracing the outline of the top-most flower. Pansy cautiously stepped away from her desk and walked quietly towards him.

“And I thought,” he continued, his voice now much quieter, “I thought that things were finally starting to change. I started to feel happy and excited again. I felt alive again, because of you…”

“…because of me?” Pansy asked, now standing right beside him.

Harry snatched his hand away from the painting and whirled back around to glare at her. “Forget it, Parkinson. Forget this whole friendship, because it’s over. I’ve helped you out with this tournament so my job’s done, and after Saturday I’ll never have to see you again, and good riddance.”

Pansy’s mouth hung open in shock. Was he serious? Was he really cutting off the friendship over something that happened seven years ago? What about everything that he had said last week, about his wanting the friendship to last forever and his wanting to spend time with her after this? She had hardly believed it to be possible, at the time, that someone would want to spend more time with her than was necessary. Why would anybody want to do that, she’d thought? But Harry … he made her feel special. He made her feel that she was important, and worth talking to, and everything else that she had been so sure she wasn’t. She had thought that he had seen something in her that she had never been able to see. 

And now it was over? Over because of some seven-year-old advice that she hadn’t even thought Ginny had taken? This wasn’t the Harry she had come to know. Harry was better than this. What was going on?

And what did he mean when he said that he felt alive again, because of her? 

“Harry, wait,” she said, catching his arm and speaking in barely more than a whisper. “Don’t do this Harry, please. Please talk to me.”

Harry looked back at her for a moment. Pansy’s heart was racing. _Come on,_ she thought. You’re Harry. You’re sodding Saint Potter. You see the good in people. We can work through this…

“No,” Harry said, wrenching his arm away from her fingers. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Goodbye, Parkinson.”

And without another word, Harry marched back to the door, flung it open and exited. The door slammed shut behind him.

Pansy’s hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes squeezed shut, and before she knew it she was crying. She hadn’t cried in years, and now here she was, her body shaking with loud, uncontrollable sobs. She sank to the floor, her knees hitting the plush carpet, and let her tears spill onto it without a worry that the salt in them might do some kind of damage to the soft material.

She stayed there for who knows how long. When she finally managed to open her eyes and stand shakily up, her eyes caught her rose painting. It had been a while since anybody had touched it, so she had forgotten the unique quality she had installed in it several years ago. But it was clear to see now. The roses in the painting had all changed colour, to a cold, hard black.

It took all of Pansy’s will-power not to start crying again. Black roses were the worst of all. Whoever had touched this painting last had harboured feelings of sadness, mourning, and farewell.

~*~YOU MAY CUT HERE~*~

“Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning! My name is Lee Jordan, and it is my great honour and privilege to welcome each and every one of you to the Ten-Year Anniversary Quidditch Tournament!”

The roar from the crowd was deafening. There was clapping, there was shouting, there were hats being thrown in the air, and twenty-eight people in brightly-coloured robes were flying all around the Quidditch pitch, hollering as loudly as everybody else.

At least, most of them were hollering. Harry Potter had agreed to fly around the pitch, but the manic shouting was too much for him to be expected to participate in. For one thing, to yell and scream happily, he would have to be happy himself, and he certainly was not. He felt as dead and empty inside as he had done before he knew of this tournament’s existence.

At the foot of the pitch two people were standing and clapping politely. One of them, with intense yellow eyes and spiky grey hair, was grinning as she gazed up at the boys and girls that she had, to some extent at least, helped to reach their full Quidditch potential. The other one, with perfectly straight, short black hair, pale green eyes and a face so heavily caked with make-up that it was difficult to tell what her actual face looked like at all, was regarding the players with tired, morose, downturned eyes. She knew that she should be proud – this was her day, after all. She had been the central figure, and everybody who was everybody knew it. But she couldn’t get excited about it at all. All she felt was sadness. She was a black rose today.

But, she was a professional. And so was Harry. So when it came down to it, they were both going to put on a brave face and do their jobs, because that was what they were there to do.

The morning went perfectly to schedule. Slytherin managed to narrowly beat Ravenclaw, if only because the Slytherin Chasers managed to land a few decent Quaffles in the last ten minutes before Madam Hooch had to declare the game over. Ironically, the Ravenclaw Seeker found the Snitch about half a minute after the game was over. Next, Gryffindor absolutely annihilated Hufflepuff 220-30 in half an hour, with Harry pulling off an incredible dive to catch the Snitch from beside one of the Hufflepuff Beater’s knees. An extended morning break later, Hufflepuff came back to tackle Slytherin and actually, to most people’s surprise, scraped a 150-140 point-win in 59 minutes. Their Chasers were absolutely hopeless, but their Seeker was keen. He saw the glint of a Snitch in the sun and managed to snatch it just in time. Then was the Ravenclaw/Gryffindor match, which went for 40 minutes with neither team scoring despite exceptional Chasing on both sides. It seemed as though the Keepers of both sides were superior. At around the 50-minute mark Harry spotted the Snitch near one of the Ravenclaw goal posts and quickly snatched it up, winning the game.

During lunch Hermione, Ginny, Ron and Harry clustered around Harry and Ginny’s dressing room and tucked into the substantial lunches the House elves had provided them.

“It’s going really well so far, mate,” Ron complimented him. “You and Parkinson did a fabulous job with this. Even the Slytherins haven’t managed to ruin it yet.”

“Pansy’s probably keeping them in line,” Ginny said, chancing a smile at Harry. Harry frowned back at her, effectively erasing the smile from Ginny’s face.

An uncomfortable silence lasted for a few moments, until Hermione said “I think you should apologise to her.”

“What?” Harry asked. “Why the hell should I do that? She did the wrong thing here. Not me.”

“You’re not thinking clearly,” Hermione answered. “It’s not as if you want to be with Ginny again, is it?”

“No,” Harry answered immediately, vigorously shaking his head. Ginny breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Of course not. But it’s the principle of the thing. She had no right to butt her nose in where it didn’t belong. And Ginny and I were happy.” Harry turned to look at Ginny then. “Weren’t we?”

“We were,” Ginny agreed. “But I was bored, Harry. And so were you. You know you were.”

“Maybe,” Harry said, shrugging. “But I was much happier with you than I am now. And that’s all her fault.”

“Mate,” Ron said, thoughtfully chewing on a piece of stray ham, “we’ve been chatting about this, and we reckon you’re talking in circles. What is it that’s really pissed you off here? The fact that Parkinson broke you and Gin up, or the fact that it was Parkinson that did it?”

Harry didn’t understand what he meant by that. “Talk in English, mate.”

“Think of it this way,” Hermione tried to clarify, “if it had been me, or Ron, who had told Ginny that she should break up with you, would you have been mad?”

“No … yes … I don’t know.” Harry shook his head. “But what’s your point?”

“All we’re suggesting,” Ginny said, “is that maybe the reason why you’re so upset is that it was Pansy who had put the idea in my mind, and Pansy also happens to be somebody that you’ve started to look at in a different way to how you look at anybody else.”

“In a different way?” Harry repeated, looking from one of them to the other. “What do you mean?”

Ginny shook her head. “We’re not going to spell it out for you, Harry,” she said. “But think about this: How much happier have you been since she’s been in your life? And how miserable are you now that you’re forcing her away?”

Harry wasn’t sure what to make of her question, nor his really obvious answer.

~*~

The afternoon games were fierce. It seemed that lunch had sparked a new surge of adrenalin in four teams. When Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw played first, both teams were unusually vicious. The Ravenclaw Seeker completed some daredevil moves, most of which fooled the Hufflepuff Seeker to such an extent that when, at around the 40 minute mark, the Ravenclaw Seeker started flying at an alarming speed toward the ground, the Hufflepuff Seeker paid him no attention. Such was his mistake, and, probably, Ravenclaw’s strategy. Ravenclaw won the game 180-50, meaning that unless Slytherin badly lost the next game, the Losers’ play-off would be between those two teams again.

Next, Gryffindor and Slytherin played. As much as everyone who knew Oliver Wood was prepared to bet that he would do anything to make a clean sweep of it, Slytherin had always been the toughest team for Gryffindor to beat. Both teams played to the death. The Chasers and Beaters pulled off moves that the audience had not seen before. They dodged other players and Bludgers through narrow gaps that would have impressed world-class players. The Slytherins got nasty and started using tactics that were so unfair that Pansy, who was umpiring, had to call foul three times, which in the space of one hour is a touch obscene. In the end Slytherin just managed to win 80-70, with Draco finding the Snitch hovering by the teacher’s stand five minutes after the end of play. The result meant that Slytherin and Gryffindor were the two teams in the final.

Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw played a relatively friendly game in the loser’s playoff. It seemed to be a chance for the players to show off what sort of moves they could manage more than anything else. The unnecessary ducking and weaving performed by the Chasers and Beaters was nothing short of mesmerising. In the end Hufflepuff found the Snitch about ten seconds before the end of play, bringing the scores to 200-50 and making Ravenclaw 4th and Hufflepuff 3rd in the competition. The two captains shook hands with smiles on their faces.

The grand final was nothing like that. Wood and Montague were prepared to play to the death, if necessary. When they shook hands it looked like a death grip, and Pansy was sure that this was going to get very ugly, very fast. 

And that it was. Montague seemed to have told his Beaters and Chasers to spare no mercy. The Chasers were pushing other Chasers out of the way and the Beaters were swinging their bats wildly, trying to hit anything that they could, whether bone or Bludger. The Gryffindor players, who didn’t believe in those sorts of tactics, were getting severely beaten up. After Pansy called her fifth foul to Gryffindor in twenty minutes she ordered a time out and the entire crowd watched her scream at Montague for about five minutes to get his bloody act together and order his team to start playing Quidditch like gentlemen, or she would order them to forfeit and award automatic victory to Gryffindor because this was her tournament, damn it, and she could do what she wanted. As Harry watched her yelling he felt a swell of something in his chest. He was not sure what it was, but it felt good, until the good feeling managed to, bizarrely, find its way to his nether-regions. Then it was embarrassing. What, he asked himself, was that about?

When Pansy allowed the teams to start playing again, the Slytherins were much more sportsmanlike, although they were sulky about it. Still the game was fierce, and both teams were showing, very clearly, that neither were forces to be reckoned with. In the end it came down to the Seekers, and as much as any Slytherin would try to deny it, Harry Potter was a far superior Seeker to Draco Malfoy. When he spotted the Snitch, Slytherin were 30 points up, and there was ten seconds left on the clock. He flattened himself so that his chest was pressed right up against the handle of his broom and flew, full-pelt, towards the little golden ball. Just as the end-of-game alarm sounded around the ground he clasped his fingers around it…

And the crowd roared with triumph. Harry landed on the ground and sprawled, exhausted, on the grass. It had been cut very short indeed, he noticed. Then he was being overshadowed by six other players rushing over and lifting him into the air. At the head of them Oliver Wood was chanting “We won! We won!”

“Pansy?” Pansy looked away from the pitch to see that Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil had approached her.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Did you want the award stand at the middle of the pitch?”

“Yes. Just put it on top of the cheering players if they don’t move,” Pansy instructed them. Lavender and Parvati grinned and ran off, leaving Pansy to look back at the Gryffindor players. They all looked so happy, and Harry, being carried by the rest of them, appeared happy as well, but lost. As lost as she felt. Suddenly she wanted to rush over there, wrap her arms around him, squeeze him tightly to her and never let go. She felt her heart start to ache. 

She took her place at the Award stand, standing up and acknowledging the crowd when Lee Jordan thanked her for organising the whole thing. Minerva McGonagall was called to the stand to give out the Snitches and trophies to the players. The prizes, of course, looked incredible. Blaise Zabini and his mate had done an excellent job. 

As Pansy watched the Gryffindor team standing together and holding up their trophies, her eyes landed on the back of Harry’s head, and again she felt her heart ache at the sight of him. Her heart hadn’t ached this badly since losing Ginny as a friend … no, actually, it ached even more than that. She could not understand it. She was annoyed at herself. She was Pansy Parkinson, for Merlin’s sake. She should be tougher than this. Wasn’t that what her father had always wanted? For her to be tough?

Well, Pansy wasn’t tough. She wasn’t like some of the other girls she knew. She was soft, and vulnerable, and that was the way it was, despite her constant efforts to hide it. Harry had seen through her mask better than anyone, and he had stayed with her anyway. Pansy had felt herself get stronger when he was around. Now that they weren’t friends any more, she was probably going to be vulnerable forever …

No. That was rubbish. And this was ridiculous. Things shouldn’t have to be this way. She and Harry were friends. Good friends. And it was completely stupid for them to be avoiding each other this way. Harry Potter was angry. She knew this. But she was stubborn. And she was going to make him listen.

And she believed she knew exactly how to do it.

As Minerva McGonagall called everybody into the Great Hall for dinner, Pansy snuck away and headed down to the greenhouses. She knew of one greenhouse that had contained exactly what she was looking for ten years ago, and she would bet anything that they would still be there now. And so often had she gone down there as a student, she knew exactly how to get inside without unlocking the door.

~*~

“You should be really proud of yourself, Harry,” Hermione said, patting him on the back. “Ron and I were watching those last few minutes, and that catch was mind-blowing.”

“It’s true, mate,” Charlie Weasley agreed, smiling over at him from Hermione’s other side. “I couldn’t have done it.”

“No offence Charlie, but what you can’t do could fill a warehouse,” George Weasley said, before having to duck to miss the swipe that Charlie aimed in his direction. “Seriously, though, nice work, Harry.”

“Cheers,” Harry said, offering them a smile and taking a long drink of pumpkin juice. It had been a pretty good day, if he looked at it objectively. He had had fun, he had been with friends, and he’d watched and played some excellent Quidditch. It was all good on paper. But he just couldn’t get Pansy, and his lunchtime conversation with the others, and the rush of … whatever it was, that he felt while he was watching her yelling at Montague, out of his mind. She looked so amazing. She _was_ so amazing. And Harry couldn’t deny it to himself – he missed her. It had been less than a week and he was missing her as though she had been away for years. 

Should he apologise? He didn’t know. He didn’t think that he had done anything inherently wrong. Pansy had done something that affected him badly, and he felt perfectly justified in being angry with her. But was he really angry with her, or was he just angry that it was her that had told Ginny, like Ron and Hermione had said? Was he angry with her, because she had indirectly caused him pain, and he was hurt that she had caused him that pain, even if it was seven years ago? Or was he just angry because he felt that she took away the very thing that he thought she could give him?

Too confused by the thoughts going around and around his head, he placed his head in his hands, and his elbow nearly landed in the lime jelly. 

“Hey, check it,” came Ginny’s voice, “it’s an owl.”

Harry looked up, and sure enough a large barn owl was swooping towards their table. Harry thought it strange that an owl was in the Great Hall at this time of day, but it didn’t concern him enough to pay it any heed. Until, of course, it landed right in front of him.

Ron looked at the owl in absolute confusion. “Is ANYBODY who doesn’t personally know you not here right now?” he asked.

“Don’t think so.” Harry reached over and pulled the scroll from the owl’s drawn out leg. Nudging his glass of pumpkin juice in the owl’s direction, he unravelled the letter and something fell out, landing on his lap.

It was a rose.

Harry gasped, his hand flying to his mouth in what he realised immediately afterwards was a very feminine manner. The rose was a bright yellow in colour; the same colour as another rose that he had bought not too long ago. 

“Pretty,” Ginny remarked, seeing the rose there. Then, seemingly, she seemed to realise something. “Wait. Is that from…?”

Harry looked at the writing on the scroll.

_I can’t do this anymore. Please, look at me._

Clutching the rose in his hand, Harry turned around and looked towards the Slytherin table. Almost immediately he saw Pansy, looking straight back at him. She was holding a rose as well, but this one, instead of being yellow, was a burning, brilliant orange.

He felt something shake. Looking down, he saw that the rose in his hand was quivering, seemingly of its own will. A few moments later, it had turned to the same colour as hers.

“Harry?” Harry spun around to see Ron and Hermione now staring at him, as well as Ginny. “Is that rose orange?”

“I … I … I have to go,” Harry said. He hopped off the bench with absolutely no grace whatsoever and offered them a half-hearted shrug. “I’ll see you later.”

“What the hell?” Ron asked, watching his best mate running off. “What’s with him? What’s the big deal about the rose?”

“Orange roses,” Hermione answered him. “They represent passion, and intense desire.”

“That’s … really disgusting. That’s –“ and then it dawned on him. “Oh.”

Harry walked as fast as he could without breaking into a full and very suspicious-looking run. He approached the Slytherin table, where Pansy was sitting amongst some of her Slytherin associates. Needless to say, she had watched him from when he had left the Gryffindor table. He felt his heart start to beat faster.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, in a surprisingly calm voice. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course.” Pansy stood up and followed him towards one of the side doors. They both slipped into the Entrance Hall, and Harry pulled her towards a shadowy corner by one of the staircases.

“So, I’m guessing you know what orange stands for—“ Pansy started to say, but then she was cut off by Harry taking her by the shoulders, pushing her against the stone wall, and kissing her.

_Oh, Merlin_ , Pansy thought. She’d not had much experience in this area at all, but she was certain that she knew enough to know whether a kiss was good or bad. And this made the notion of ‘good’ seem like child’s play. This was unbelievable. His technique was flawed, certainly. He was rough, he seemed more than a little desperate, and she suspected that he was out of practice. But somehow it worked, and the sensations he was evoking were breathtaking. That tingling sensation was back. Before she knew it she was kissing him back with equal vigour.

It took them what probably amounted to a very long time indeed to break apart, and when they did she was gripping fistfuls of his shirt with clenched fingers, and his forehead was pressed against hers.

“Can we get out of here?” Harry asked, his breath heavy in her ear.

“Merlin, yes,” she answered. 

~*~

They ran through the grounds as quickly as they could. The second they were out, Pansy felt Harry’s hand wrap itself tightly around her arm, then the claustrophobic sensation of Apparition, then they were standing outside what she assumed was his flat.

“You _could_ have just Apparated us directly inside—ow!” 

Harry had pushed her against the door, with more force than was probably necessary. Pansy shook herself and fixed him with the most evil glare than she could manage. “I’d really appreciate it if you could refrain from pushing me against hard surfaces, because, you know, I bruise like a peach—“

“You look so beautiful right now that I can’t stand it,” Harry interrupted her.

Pansy very nearly choked on her words. She had no time to recover before Harry had stepped forward and laid his hands on her waist.

“That shut you up,” he said, bending down to kiss her again. Any pain that Pansy might have been feeling from making contact with the door vanished from her attention as soon as their lips met. Her arms managed to find their way onto his shoulders as he pressed further into her. The tingling sensation was back, full-force, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

When they broke apart again, Harry smiled down at her, pulled his wand out of his pocket and magicked the door unlocked. He reached past her and pulled it open, his actions gentle in a way that was contradictory to how he had been before.

“Wait here,” he said, guiding her into a small but airy living room. “There’s something I want to get.”

“Erm, OK.” Harry left the room, and Pansy sat down, feeling confused. She was under the impression that they were going to go straight to his bedroom and fling themselves at each other, with her anxiously hoping that her make-up would hold out well enough for it. So what was Harry doing? Bringing in a bottle of wine? Or a box of chocolates? That wasn’t really what she had in mind.

Harry came back, and to her surprise he was holding a white packet of some description.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Muggles use these,” Harry explained, taking a seat next to her. “When they’re cleaning their hands… or faces.”

“Oh right,” Pansy said, nodding and wondering why he would bother with that when a simple Cleaning Charm would do the trick … then she realised what he was intending to do.

“No,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.

“Why not?” Harry asked.

“Because,” she answered, covering her cheeks with her hands, “I don’t want you to.”

“I’ll say it again: Why not?” Harry put the packet on the floor, scooted closer to her and, with some prying, took her hands away from her cheeks. “You know,” he said, his hand reaching up to stroke the side of her face, “I’ve never seen you without make-up on. Even in Hogwarts you wore it every day.”

“It’s better that way.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Make-up hides blemishes,” Pansy explained. “It hides lines, and spots, and other things. Ugly things. People don’t want to see ugly things.”

“What makes you so sure that they’re ugly?” Harry asked. 

“They are ugly. They’re flaws.”

“I see.” Harry reached down and picked up the packet again. Pulling out a small wipe from the packet, he turned back to her.

“Has it ever crossed your mind,” he asked, “that the real beauty of a person is in their flaws? It’s the flaws that make people unique. You’re beautiful, Pansy.”

Pansy glared at him, and he shook his head. “You don’t have to agree, but trust me, you are. You’re so beautiful. But you hide it.” He held up the wipe. “Please,” he said. “Let me see?”

Pansy stopped glaring at him, choosing to look away instead. This bothered her greatly. She put her make-up on straight after her morning shower every morning, and it didn’t come off until right before bed. Nobody had seen her without make-up on since she was thirteen. What if Harry took it off … and didn’t like what he saw?

“Will you run away?” she found herself asking.

Harry looked at her in confusion. “What?”

“If you don’t like it, will you run away?” she said, her voice quivering. “Will you want to look at me again, if it’s too ugly for you? If what’s inside me is too ugly?”

He didn’t respond for a moment, and Pansy wondered if he was going to stand up and walk away right then. But then she felt a hand on her cheek, and her face being turned around so that she was looking him straight in the eye.

“Do you trust me?” he asked her.

Pansy blinked at him. What sort of question was that? She’d had no time to think of an answer. Funnily enough she didn’t need the time. She nodded, without any doubt crossing her mind.

“Then trust me now,” he said, holding the wipe to the side of her face. “You’re beautiful, Pansy Parkinson. All of you is beautiful. Beautiful, and amazing. I know you think you’re nothing, and I know that’s all your dad felt of you, but what about your mum? She thought you were everything. And I think that you’re becoming everything to me too. I want you, all of you, in my life more than I can say.”

Pansy had never had such a shower of compliments forced on her before. At least, not that she could remember. Her brain completely locked in her attempt to figure out a worthy response, and Harry took the opportunity to wipe at her cheeks with the wipe. She couldn’t find the drive to stop him.

Soon he was done, and he sat back to take a look at her. Truth be told, she didn’t look that different. Her eyes were still that same light green, her mouth the same shape, her face still carrying traces of the pug. He noticed slight bags under her eyes that he couldn’t see before. The corners of her eyes also carried a few more wrinkles than he would have guessed, and there were a few freckles on the bridge of her nose. But apart from that, it was Pansy. 

“Normally the eye bags aren’t so pronounced,” Pansy said, dabbing at them. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

Harry smiled, inching closer to her again. “I like them,” he said. He ran a hand along the side of her face, which now felt much smoother since the make-up was gone. “I haven’t been sleeping well either. So now we match, don’t we?”

“Hmm,” Pansy said, placing a hand on the side of his face in return. “I guess we do.”

“I was right, you know,” Harry said. “You look so much better without make-up on. More real.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her lightly. “I feel closer to you now.”

Pansy smiled and kissed him back. “It feels kind of nice not having all that stuff on my face.”

“I can imagine.” He kissed her again, but didn’t stop this time. Pansy pulled at his shirt again, and they soon found themselves lying on the couch, his weight pushing down on her. It felt amazing, being that close to someone. Pansy doubted that she would ever get tired of this.

When they broke apart Harry smiled back down at her. “Should we move this to the bedroom?” he asked.

~*~

As soon as they entered the bedroom, Harry pushed Pansy against the recently closed bedroom door.

“What in Merlin’s name, Potter? Do you have a thing for pushing people against doors, or something?”

“Not normally,” Harry admitted. “But with you it makes your hair stick up a bit, which makes you look ruffled, which is kind of hot.”

Pansy froze, again, at Harry’s compliment. But only for a second. She reached behind her, patted the back of hair, and cocked her head thoughtfully. “My hair is naturally wavy, you know,” she said.

“From Hogwarts,” Harry said, nodding. “I remember. How do you keep it straight like that?”

“Daily charm and potions,” Pansy answered. “And regular haircuts.”

Harry threaded his fingers through her hair, before taking a few strands and inspecting it. “Do you like it straight?” he asked.

Pansy shrugged. “It’s tidier this way,” she answered. 

“I think it looks nice,” Harry said, and in a move more personal than any they had done thus far that evening, he leaned in and breathed heavily, presumably to take in the smell. Pansy could feel his breath on her neck, and her head lolled to the side accordingly.

“I think it would look nice wavy too,” Harry added. Pansy wondered if she was supposed to say anything in reply, but then she felt the hot, wet sensation of Harry’s lips kissing her neck, and before she could help herself she let out a soft moan. Harry grinned against her skin. He couldn’t lie to himself: the idea of Pansy Parkinson breaking away from her normally meticulously poised self and becoming animalistic was probably the biggest turn-on that he could have imagined. Perhaps that was why the more private of his body parts had enjoyed it so much when she was yelling at Montague earlier today.

“You know what?” he whispered to her.

“What?” Pansy asked. She was leaning against the door now, clutching the handle with one hand for some inkling of support.

“I liked it when you were yelling at Montague.”

“I’m sure. You never kept secret how much you dislike him—“

“No, no. I liked how you looked while you were yelling. You looked strong, and powerful. It was … sexy.”

“Sexy?” Pansy asked, biting her lips to keep from moaning again. Harry hadn’t even touched her breasts and she was already starting to melt. “Aren’t sexy women the ones who wear tight clothes and lounge by pool sides and have complete control over their emotions, and their sexuality?”

“To some men, maybe,” Harry said, now starting to lick at her. “I just like women who yell.”

“Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’m not really that much of a yell—Oh Merlin!” Pansy raked a hand down Harry’s back as he clamped down on her and started sucking. She needed more. More of him. And now would be nice. She took her trembling hands away from his back and started pulling at his shirt.

“Not much of a yeller, was it?” Harry asked.

“Shut up. Lift up your arms.” Harry did as he was told and she managed to pull his shirt and undershirt off together. Harry retaliated by removing her shirt too, and she pushed him now, back, back, until the backs of his knees hit his bed.

“Lie down,” she ordered.

“Can you order me around all the time?” Harry asked, happily complying.

Pansy smiled. “If you’d like.” She climbed on after him and, after taking a moment to think, straddled his hips. The evidence of his arousal poked her inner thigh.

“Someone’s keen,” she commented.

“Well, to be honest, I’m pretty excited too,” he retorted.

“Ho,” she said. “I see what you did there.” She snaked her way up his chest, which she noticed with amusement didn’t have much in the way of hair, until she reached his lips. They kissed, again, and Pansy closed her eyes. She didn’t think she could ever tire of kissing Harry. They were already starting to learn how to do it better, so not as much confusing biting and teeth-scraping was involved. Not that it mattered. Even the most teeth-scraping of kisses with Harry would be immensely enjoyable, as far as she was concerned. 

As she kissed him his hands reached up and lightly stroked her stomach. Her breath hitched and he smiled to himself. Going higher, he ran his hands along the silky fabric of her bra. Her breasts, he noticed, were fairly medium-sized. They suited her well, he thought. Large enough to be called existent, but not so big that they drowned out the rest of her. With some fiddling he managed to snake his hand inside her left cup and feel the soft flesh underneath. The nipple hardened almost instantly and Pansy moaned against his mouth, breaking the kiss in distraction.

“You like that, I’m guessing,” he said.

“Merlin, yes,” she gasped, trying to press her breast further into his hand.

“You know, if you take this thing off, I might be able to get in closer – ok then.” Pansy had reached behind herself and undone her bra as soon as Harry had uttered the word “off”. It vaguely occurred to him that if every woman could work their bras as quickly as Pansy just had, then it would take women so much less time to get ready in the morning. But then he moved one hand to each breast and started kneading, and the sounds coming from Pansy’s mouth were far too decadent for him to worry about trivialities like the time it took women to get dressed.

Difficult though it was for her to concentrate, Pansy somehow managed to bring the hand that she wasn’t using to support herself down to his trousers. Thanking whatever magical deity she could think of that Quidditch trousers traditionally didn’t require belts, buttons or zippers, she managed to pull them down enough for him to realise what she was trying to do, and wriggle out of them. The tent his erection made with his boxers that she could now see didn’t exactly leave much to the imagination.

“Oh gee. Bit on the small side, I see,” she said.

“I could pinch you where it would really hurt right now, you realise?” he replied.

”Some people like that,” she answered.

“Do you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Hmm. We can try it out some other time. I’d like to remember this time as being virtually pain-free.”

“I would have liked that too, except you pushed me against so many walls that my whole back is probably bruised.”

“Sorry,” Harry apologised, not sounding remotely apologetic.

“Hmm,” Pansy grumbled. “You’re lucky that I kind of liked it.”

“And you’re lucky that I have nothing but confidence over the size of my man-parts.”

Pansy looked about ready to retort, but Harry’s hands resumed their massaging and what instead came out was a sort of gurgle. She undid the buttons on her own trousers and, after some manoeuvring, managed to get them off. 

“Don’t suppose we can swap, can we?” Harry asked.

“What?”

“Never mind,” Harry said, and with an astonishingly well-executed acrobatic flip, he managed to reverse their positions so that Pansy was now lying, legs spread haphazardly, below him. Harry was about to make a joke when he noticed the flicker of panic across her face. He frowned, sat up, and pulled her upright.

“Pansy,” he murmured, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve already told you that.”

“But you’re still scared.”

Pansy frowned, wishing not for the first time that he wasn’t so good at reading her. She nodded. “It’s been a while. That’s all.”

Harry returned her nod. “It has been for me too. But listen. As much as I want you, I know that this sort of thing is a pretty big step. So if you feel too uncomfortable at any point, please tell me. And I’ll stop.”

“OK,” Pansy agreed. Then she said, “Are you sure? Because you shouldn’t have to wait.”

“Of course I’m sure. And I should have to wait if you’re uncomfortable. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the important one here. And you’re worth the wait.”

She smiled at him, resting a hand on his cheek, then letting it drop onto his chest. Taking a deep breath, she lay back down.

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to wait,” she said. “So get to it, Potter. Or I shall have to hex you.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I won’t tell a lie: I was hoping for that option.”

“I think most people are.” Pansy beckoned to him and he shuffled back forward to give her another of their heart-stopping kisses. This time as they kissed, Harry wormed his hand down her side, finding the thin elastic of her knickers. He snuck his hand in there and felt around a bit. She was pretty wet, and he couldn’t deny that that made him feel quite pleased with himself. Silently thanking Ginny for the lessons she had given him in the bedroom, he rooted around until he found her tiny nub of pleasure. He rubbed his now-slick fingers over it several times, and felt her legs squirming excitedly on either side of him. He pressed harder and he could feel her resulting groan. 

They broke the kiss and Pansy writhed continued to writhe under him. “Oh Merlin, that’s good,” she sighed.

“Glad you like it,” Harry replied. He sat up again and snuck his other hand inside her knickers. After a moment he found her opening and wormed two fingers inside. He pushed and pulled them back and forth, while continuing to press on her clitoris. 

“Oh hell. Oh Merlin. Oh … oh.” Pansy moaned, unable to keep still. She arched herself towards him, trying to get him to press harder, to rub harder, to put more fingers in, to do _something_ more. She was so close. She could feel it.

And then he stopped.

At first Pansy didn’t realise. She just thought he was stretching out his fingers or something. But then the pressure she desperately wanted stopped and she was at a loss, her body screaming for more. She looked up, confused, to see him smiling down at her.

“Harry,” she said breathlessly, “I hope you won’t find me too rude here, but what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Thinking about how best to get your knickers off,” Harry replied casually. Pansy realised that he had somehow managed to get himself out of his own undies, and suffice it to say that he had every reason to be confident in the size of his man-parts. “I mean, I hope that you won’t find me too rude here, but I can’t very well fuck you with them on, can I?”

“You could try,” Pansy answered, but she wriggled out of her knickers regardless, then lay back down and opened herself up for him. “Satisfied?” she asked.

“I should be relatively soon,” Harry answered. He took hold of himself and, sparing no more time for niceties, entered her with one quick, savage thrust. Pansy let her head fall back. This was what it was all about. The feeling of being completely filled by another person was incredible. It was pleasurable, of course, but at that exact moment Pansy was feeling more than just pleasure. She felt whole, in a way that she hadn’t before. Never had she been so exposed before, and never had she thought that she could be so exposed with another person, and feel so comfortable. It was the best feeling in the world, and she knew then that she wanted that feeling, with Harry, for as long as she lived.

“Pansy?” She looked up to see Harry watching her, concern etched all over his face. “You’re crying.”

“Am I?” Pansy swiped at her eyes. “Sorry. I’m just—“

“I know.” Harry rested the bulk of his weight on her, brushed her hair back and kissed her, softly. “Me too.”

“Really? You feel the same way?”

He pressed his face against her cheek. 

“You complete me,” he whispered in her ear.

Pansy stroked the back of his head. She could feel the tears falling out of her eyes now. Then he shifted his position, just slightly, and she felt a delightful tug on her clitoris. She sighed again, and Harry smiled, wiped away her tears, and snuck his hand between them.

“Oh my,” she sighed as he rubbed at her clit. Her back arched up, the better to press her breasts against Harry’s chest. She circled her legs around him.

“Move,” she said, quietly. “Please.”

“If the lady wishes,” Harry answered, and he started pushing his hips backwards and forwards. He started slow, but before long Pansy was tightening her grip on him and he was quickening his pace. He continued to rub her clit at the same time, and the combination of sensations was almost overwhelming. She was sure that she would be leaving scratches on him with the pressure her fingernails were exerting on his back, but she didn’t care. Harry kept on thrusting, faster and faster, until with one final thrust they both cried “yes!” and climaxed together, clutching each other as though terrified that they would somehow disappear if they didn’t hold on. She couldn’t count how long it lasted, but she could tell well enough when it was over, when Harry collapsed on top of her and her breath caught in her throat.

They stayed there for several moments, listening to each other’s breath catch up with them. Pansy could feel her eyes watering up again, and she brought her hands up to wipe away the tears.

“I wasn’t that bad, was I?” Harry asked, noticing her tears.

Pansy let out a laugh. “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything…”

Harry rolled off her, and the next thing she knew she’d been hit across the face with a pillow.

“Hey!” She sat up, grabbed the other pillow and whacked him back. He caught the pillow and threw them both on the floor. He sat up and took her face in his hands.

“Really,” he said, looking at her. “Are you all right?”

Pansy nodded. “I’m all right. I’m not really used to … this. Any of this. That’s all. But you were amazing.”

“So were you,” Harry replied.

“Thank you,” Pansy said, without thinking.

“Hey.” Harry took his hands away from her. “I just gave you a compliment, and you didn’t freeze.”

Pansy’s eyes widened in surprise. “Oh wow. I can’t believe it. I’ve never done that before.”

Harry grinned at her. “I’m so proud of you.”

Pansy shook her head, looking away from him. She then noticed something on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“Look,” she said, crawling across the bed and looking down at it. Harry followed her, placing a hand on her back.

One of their roses from earlier this evening was lying, discarded, on the floor. Pansy would have to reprimand herself later for letting a rose go to waste, but that wasn’t the point of concern. The rose had changed colour again. It was now a deep, luscious red. Of course, red was another rose colour that expressed desire and passion. 

But such was its secondary meaning. By and large, the red rose represented affection and love.

“Red,” Harry whispered. 

“How about that?” Pansy replied. 

They looked at each other, smiled, and leaned in for yet another breathtaking kiss.


End file.
